-- By Tom Phillips
In 2011, a 59-year-old North
Carolina man held up a bank, then waited for police to come and arrest
him. He was sick, uninsured, and wanted to go to prison to get health
care. Here in New York, many young black men say prison is the only
place they've ever eaten regular meals.
Prison offers educational
opportunities and a chance to make long-lasting friendships. It also gives you
freedom to think and create. Many authors have found inspiration behind
bars -- from Oscar Wilde and Jean Genet to Eldridge Cleaver and Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn. And Martin Luther King made his most profound and moving plea for racial justice in his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail."
Not to romanticize incarceration;
it's a drag at best, violent and life-threatening at worst. Boredom and
rumination are your worst enemies -- with little to do in present time, you can
get hung upside down in the past. It takes discipline to stay in
the present, and not think about the future -- i.e. when will this be
over? It ain't over 'til it's over.
But now that we're all under
house arrest, those of us who have our own living space should count our
blessings.
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| Plaque near Thoreau's cabin site, Concord MA |
Chief among them is the radical simplification
of life. Work has dried up, travel is out of the question, restaurants
and bars are closed, meat is scarce, parties are banned, money sits in wallets
with nowhere to go.
In a way our souls have
transmigrated to an earlier America: e.g.Walden Pond in the 1850s. Like
Henry David Thoreau, we sit in our cabins, alone or with a lone companion,
contemplating ourselves. And like Thoreau's contemporary Ralph Waldo
Emerson, we must rely on ourselves.
