“Them”
“There is no crime, absolutely none, that cannot be condoned when it is
committed by our side.” – George Orwell
I first realized that I was the enemy of society when I was a homeless child sleeping on the roofs of steaming laundromats and eating the abundant varieties of food thrown in business dumpsters. (This was before grocery stores defeated the homeless by installing trash compactors we couldn’t access.)
I was homeless by choice. I’d been offered the hospitality of 30-40 foster homes which I impolitely declined, running loose until the courts gave up and legally emancipated me at age 16.
It’s possible that one of those foster homes I escaped from would’ve provided me with security, nurture, possibly even love, but I refused to gamble. I despised authority, saw it as a disease that transmutated ordinary people into monsters. Four decades later, rotting in a former slave state prison for a crime I didn’t commit, my opinion about authority hasn’t improved much.
Before I reached age 14, I had been assaulted 3 times by police officers; once so severely it took more than a week in the hospital to recover. They hurt me not because of criminal acts, but ostensibly because I lacked respect. Yet the truth is that my irreverence didn’t provoke them nearly as much as my disparity. I belonged to a different tribe, and I was a powerless divergent unable to retaliate. The establishment and its police have always victimized people without status or property; they were the proverbial “us”, and I was “them”, enemies from the dawn of mankind.
As individual people, those cops may have had empathy, or perhaps children my age, but as a group, a tribe, they were evil, able to suppress the slightest compassion and unconsciously dehumanize outsiders.
When I grew up I almost joined their number, not as a cop but maybe something even more antipathetic: a patriot. I enlisted in the military and surrendered to their indoctrination. They tried to install the capability to murder innocents, without conscience, by convincing me that they and their children were my enemies; less than human because they weren’t Americans. Much to my shame, I believed that for awhile.
We invaded Iraq to “protect democracy”, to bomb their wicked establishment into submission, but a war between governments is a farce of the rich; the privileged always initiate wars, but it’s the underprivileged youth that fight and die in them; the poor and their children who pay the direct price.
I never did get good at following rules, and it wasn’t long before my military career ended. Once again I was regulated to one of “them”, a disenfranchised human of no money or status, who lacked the hive worker skills necessary to acquire any.
I was a drifter, drove a clunker, and had long hair; each a crime in itself. Like diverse strangers everywhere (eg: racial minorities, homosexuals, homeless people, etc.) I became a target for police. In a southern town where disparity was the ultimate sin, I was jailed.
Attorney General, Janet Reno said: “Justice is available only to those who can afford lawyers.” How right she was. I would’ve fared so much better if I had been wealthy and guilty rather than poor and innocent. Or I could’ve at least saved my life if I had capitulated to the politically ambitious prosecutor and accepted his 5 year easy conviction plea deal. Instead I demanded a trial by my “peers”, and they sentenced me to die in a plantation penitentiary.
If I thought poverty and diversity made me less than human, I soon discovered that there’s absolutely nothing lower than a prisoner. Even lab monkeys have more enforceable rights to humane treatment than prisoners. We have less prestige than all the unarmed black men, homosexuals and homeless put together.
Just a few months before the police murdered George Floyd and set off international protests, prison guards went into the cage above mine and beat a naked old man named Frank Digges to death. There were, of course, no protests, and I’m betting you’ve never heard of him, even though his murder, and a gruesome photo of spinal fluid leaking down his face was published in a major newspaper. (The Houston Chronicle)
Why haven’t you heard of Frank Digges and the thousands of other prisoners tortured and murdered? Because you don’t care, and the media knows it. Because we’re the ultimate “them”, the WWII Jews, the early native Americans with valuable land, the plantation slaves, etc., etc. The marginalized that you as a society don’t even acknowledge as human beings.
Given human nature, it seems impossible that concepts like social justice, or its sibling, criminal justice, will ever truly exist. Our tribal instinct is so strong that even small children will cruelly attack a child who’s different. History is full of powerful groups committing atrocities against weaker groups. One could argue that’s all history is. Family, race, religion, nationality…we all belong to a tribe and we’re all guilty of injustice, but that’s not the greatest tragedy, it’s how easily we rationalize our evil.
I will likely die in a cage for the crime of being “them”, but I still think that social empathy and justice are possible. It won’t be accomplished by appealing to groups because groups naturally set themselves above and apart from outsiders. But as individuals, I think we’re all capable of walking in other people’s shoes, and it’s often someone’s story that inspires it. Stories allow us to see strangers as humans. So I write, not just to have my story heard, but the stories and voices of thousands of prisoners, many of whom are functionally illiterate and have no voice of their own.
“An enemy is a person whose story we have not heard. - Gene Hoffman
