Barack Obama and Birds of a Feather I

The government engineered the HIV virus to kill black people.  The governments ships crack cocaine to the streets to imprison black people.  The United States deserved 9/11 because of their foreign policy decisions.  God damn America.

This is the message that Jeremiah Wright, the lifelong pastor and mentor of Barack Obama, preaches from the pulpit in his church.  Sounds like a great guy.  I’m not sure what was more stunning:  That a sane adult could utter this nonsense, or that a few hundred sane adults in the pews – presumably with their children – could cheer and clap like he’s Moses on Mount Sinai.

Where’s the dissent?  Where’s the rationality?  Doesn’t anyone have the guts to stand up and ask this guy to prove some of those claims?  Hey, if the government created AIDS to kill black people, you have an obligation to present some evidence and bring these people to justice.  If you claim to be preaching Jesus’s message, do you think he would approve of saying that a bunch of fucking secretaries and filing clerks deserved to be murdered on 9/11?  This church even gave a lifetime achievement award to the racist hate-monger Louis Farrakham.

And this is Senator Brack Obama’s mentor.  The man who married him and his wife.  The man who baptized his children.  The man who inspired him to write a book.  A presidential candidate has been going to this church for twenty years.  A United States Senator lends credence to this type of filth.

So Obama comes out and distances himself from these statements.  Says he vehemently disagrees with them.  Does some damage control.  Like every other so-called penitent politician, he only answers for the things when they hurt him.  Never beforehand.  If no one had ever brought it up, do you suppose Barack Obama would have come out on his own and explained this to the American public?  Put it this way:  Would Eliot Spitzer have ever had an attack of conscience and admitted to the world that he’d been visiting a prostitute on his own?

To me, Obama seemed to lose all his charisma when he was explaining his pastor.  He didn’t look like the golden boy anymore; he looked like typical plastic-smiled politician trying to squirm his way out of something that’s damaging his career.  And what did he say?  He wants us to believe that he never heard those particular statements.  In twenty years, he never had an inkling.  No friend came up afterwards and told him about it.  No friend of his wife ever told her.  He was so incredibly incognizant that those statements never reached his ears, even though Wright was shouting them for everyone to hear.

This strains credulity to the point of absurdity  Is it even possible to have a close personal friend for twenty years and not know he harbors sentiments like that?  Indeed, that he spoke them out loud to hundreds or thousands of people who were your friends, the members of your parish?  Is Obama deaf or mentally impaired?  Honestly, how can we be expected to believe this?

To me, however, the most telling statement in Obama’s face-saving speech was his equivocation:  He said that of course he disagrees with things his pastor has said, just as everyone disagrees with some things their pastors say.

Really?  Is that Obama’s excuse?  He’s trying to lower the pastors and other spiritual leaders around the nation to the level of his racist anti-American mentor Jeremiah Wright?  Maybe that type of rhetoric elicits just a normal, run-of-the-mill disagreement for Senator Obama, but I suspect that for most Americans, it would be a deal-breaker.  Perhaps he shouldn’t insult the rest of us by implying that we’d put up with that type of nonsense, as he apparently does.

I hope that any American who hears those types of lies and hate from their spiritual leader will leave that church.  There are better paths to Jesus than the one Senator Obama appears to have taken.

Why I Think God is Useless

What has God ever done for us?  I’m talking about the father-figure sky god of the three great monotheistic religions.  I want to know exactly what purpose He serves, because I honestly can’t figure it out.  This is a serious question, with all due respect:  What is God good for?

Does God put food in our stomachs or a roof over our heads?  No, hard work of the charity of other human beings does that.  Does God heal our children if they get sick?  No, modern medicine does that.  Does God prevent horrible things from happening to good people?  Nope, the action and sacrifice of human beings does that.  Does God give us beauty, grace, and art?  Again, human beings produce that all by themselves.  Does God prevent wars, famine, earthquakes, and floods?  Has God done anything about the AIDS virus?  Did God devise solutions to malaria, yellow fever, and smallpox?  Can God ensure that your kids will grow up safe and educated and happy?  Does God save unborn fetuses?  Did God stop the Nazis?  Did God give us the knowledge for modern agriculture, sanitation, and refrigeration so that the earth can support billions of more people than it otherwise could?  Has God done anything about the madmen trying to produce biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons with the intent of wiping out entire races of people?  Has God ever shed an ounce of sweat to stop a child molester?  Does God ever give money to feed the poor?  Does God ever help build a house for a homeless person?  Has God ever done anything to keep the environment clean or conserve natural resources?  Did God do anything to prevent Mutual Assured Destruction during the Cold War?  Has God ever put any effort into stopping all the evil done in His name?  Has God ever put any effort into stopping evil at all?

If you think God has done any of this, prove it.  Prove that it wasn’t all the effort of human beings.  If you think God did many wonderful miracles in biblical times, prove it.  And if you can, why doesn’t He still do those things, especially since nowadays they are needed more than ever?

Do we need God for morality?  Why?  We’ve devised morality by ourselves.  No sacred text proffers the first amendment.  Jesus never told us to treat women as equals or to free slaves.  Did God give us moral sense to begin with?  Where’s the evidence that points to this?  Even the lower primates have an innate sense of fairness and injustice.  Did God give us the ability to love?  Why is He required for that?  Why take away from a human being’s capacity for love?  Why insult us by saying we’re inherently flawed and low-minded and in need of magic to be capable of love and altruism?

Did God create us in the first place?  Prove it.

We make our own lives, we put in all the labor.  We toil and sweat and fail repeatedly in our attempt to succeed.  Our lives are about struggle.  We aren’t given any divine insight or quick solutions or cheat-sheets; we have to learn the hard way, build from the bottom, stand on the shoulders of giants.  We reap the benefits of our advances, but we also swallow all the pain and consequences when bad things happen.

Where does God come in?  What does He do?  Our earthly accomplishments are the only things that are solid and dependable.  If your child gets leukemia, you might pray, but don’t only pray.  You take that child to doctors who use the science of modern medicine.  You might argue that God gave us the capacity to reason and discover the tools of modern medicine, but until you can prove it, it’s just an opinion that lowers mankind and elevates something else.  Why do that at all?

Nietzsche said God is dead, but does it even matter whether He is or not?  He does nothing.  He can’t even do something as simple as dictate moral laws that every human should follow.  We were forced to improve upon them and reinterpret them and throw away the ridiculous ones.  We do God’s job for Him.  From my perspective, we’re putting in all the work, yet people give Him all the credit.

What’s Killing the Kids

Turn on any TV show featuring young people.  Watch the legions of panting blonde mannequins who adhere to the current rules for making men desire them:  Empty your brain of thoughts, fill your chest with saline, and pretend physical attraction is respect.  Observe the ranks of posturing mindless male dummies who think manhood is machismo and social status is akin to divinity.

A permissive culture inundated with sex and violence is not the problem.  I see the issue as one of self-worth.  Kids today are growing up thinking that their only personal value lies in their sexuality.  For them, this translates to how attractive they are to the opposite gender, how cool they look and sound, and how trendy their clothes are.  They invest all of their time, energy, and resources into these goals.  As a result, they’re destroying their individuality.  They’re remaking themselves into what they expect others will want.

Young people today think their tan is indicative of how hard they work in life.  They don’t understand the difference between beauty and sexuality.  Young women earn self-esteem from how many men get an erection from looking at them; the young men get it by one-upping their buddies in bragging contests.  These kids don’t have a clue about who they want to be because they can’t figure out who they are.  They’re too busy stressing over how to get someone to like them or be attracted to them.  They’re selling their metaphorical souls to Eva Longoria and Kanye West.

I’ve said it before; the problem with the culture is that it’s teaching the kids to be shallow.  Everything stems from that.  Shallow kids can’t define themselves except by how “hot” they are, and so they have no self-respect and no responsibility.  They have nothing but the illusion of free will, when the reality is that they’re trying desperately to abolish all their free will for trend.  They’d rather be vapid and hot than interesting and obscure.  This is a surrender of everything that makes your life worthwhile.  This is death.

To succeed in transforming these kids from automatons into real people, they must become aware of the problem.  They must be told that their cup size, designer clothing, and car will not give them happiness or value.  They must realize that a tanned six-pack won’t make them better people.  Talking and behaving like their favorite rapper or starlet will not reveal any mysteries about life.  They need to be told that they’re acting dumb, and they need to be ashamed of that.

The obstacle is that advice is generally wasted on the young.  I thought that similar things were important when I was a kid, and I didn’t listen to anyone.  Indeed, maybe a refusal to take advice from authority figures – even if it’s good advice – is about the only independent thing of which the youth are capable.

It’s a little amazing – and perhaps a little humiliating – when you wake up one day and realize that social status is a joke, and  only the truly moronic and depthless think it’s amusing past the age of about nineteen.  Trust me, kids, there is nothing important whatsoever in how cool you look, how socially acceptable you are, or how many people of the opposite gender you’ve banged.  That stuff only matters if you make it matter.  It’s an opinion, and opinions are usually worth exactly zero.  The sooner you realize this, the sooner you can start doing what actually matters in life: being yourself.

Skepticism is not Depression

It’s inevitable that anyone who doubts the existence of God, challenges the Bible, or questions faith will be subjected to the pop psychoanalysis of one creationist or another.  Observe:

“You doubt the existence of God because you’re depressed/angry/rebellious/incarcerated.  Once you can get past that, you’ll come to see how wonderful and beautiful and comforting faith in Jesus really is.”

I despise when people use stereotyping and/or some psychobabble they heard on Dr. Phil to try to wrap their brain around a subject.  Why not ask the person why they doubt God’s existence, rather than making a completely groundless assumption?  So many people would rather be told what is correct than think.  They’d rather put everything in a neat little box that doesn’t require much head-scratching to understand.  The only good thing about stereotyping is that it’s the best way for an ignoramus to announce his or her ignorance.

I know for a fact that some people are comforted by faith in a particular deity.  I am not.  I don’t consider faith to be a virtue.  I consider faith in a virtuous idea to be a virtue, but only because the idea is virtuous.  Faith is an opinion, which means there must be a standard for whether the belief to which it’s applied is good or bad.  Beliefs are not to be “respected,” as so many creationists like to say.  We should respect good beliefs, not any belief.

That being said, I do not doubt the existence of God because I’m depressed.  While I am not a particularly happy individual, it has nothing to do with a lack of faith.  It is simply the result of being in prison – and knowing that even through I’ll be released one day, I may not deserve to be.  There is no “hole” in my life that faith can fill.  Further, even if faith in Jesus gave me comfort (it does not, speaking from experience), why should I seek comfort?  It would be low-minded and hypocritical of me.  I don’t deserve comfort; those whom I’ve hurt deserve it.

I do not doubt the existence of God because I’m young and rebellious, or because I think Christians are pansies, or because I’m unable to express heartfelt emotion.  I don’t disagree that Jesus taught good moral lessons – I’m just not convinced they’re of divine origin.

I do not doubt the existence of God because I’m angry about all of the horrible things in the world.  I am moved to anger by those things, and I would probably not worship the deity of the Bible even if His existence were proven, but that is beside the point.  Convince me that He exists, and then we’ll talk about whether I should worship Him or not.

Finally, I do not doubt the existence of God because I want a universe without consequences.  This is by far the most common idiocy I’ve heard.  First of all, my like or dislike of such a universe says absolutely nothing about whether God is real or not.  Secondly, I freely admit – and embrace – the idea that I deserve to be punished for my crimes.  I am not skeptical of God’s existence because it helps me psychologically squirm out of being judged for my actions.  If God is real and I am to face divine justice, so be it.  I don’t fear that fate.

I doubt God’s existence for a variety of reasons.  Perhaps most importantly, I’m capable of divesting emotion, hope, and fear from the question.  Thus, it becomes no different than doubting the existence of Zeus, alien abductions, or Atlantis.  It is an extraordinary claim like the myraid of similar extraordinary claims pervasive in the hearts and minds of human beings, and as Carl Sagan noted, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

If anyone has extraordinary evidence – and by that I means something other than personal experience or opinion – I’d like to hear it.  My mind is open.  I am not an atheist.  I welcome the reevaluation of my skepticism in this matter if such evidence is presented.

Britney Should Have Been an Orphan

I just read the new Rolling Stone article about Britney Spears, titled “An American Tragedy.”  I think they got the title wrong; it would have been more apt to call it, “An American Success Story.”

I say that because who has derived more success out of Britney’s plight than America?  Millions have gotten their enjoyment out of her, gleaned their pleasure, had their fill, since she was a teenager.  They’ve attained success by sucking every bit of worth and vitality out of the product they built, this kid they transformed into a meat puppet for their entertainment.  Everyone who cared and many who didn’t got a piece of Britney.  She came out underage and titillating the masses at the fingertips of her masters, giving America an excuse to justify underage porn.  Finally, a bunch of middle-aged men could pretend to fuck their teenage daughters and not be ashamed to talk about it at the water cooler the next day.

I have a question:  What do you call it when someone looks at the genitalia of a person without their permission?  If you answered “a sex crime,” you’d be correct.  Yet somehow such an act is justified and normalized if the subject happens to be Britney Spears’s vagina in the back seat of a car.  Does the fact that she accidentally displayed it in a public make any difference whatsoever?  It shouldn’t, but try telling that to the legions of sex offenders out there who looked.

Even today, as she’s apparently “spiraling into dementia,” she continues to be stripped and shucked by America.  Her problems have replaced her sexuality as the cash crop of the Britney brand.  Now instead of drooling over her virtue, they salivate over her shame.  Even Dr. Phil tried to cash in.  The conservatives run stories about her because they say she “provides a good warning to other kids.”

Yeah, okay.  How many other kids are ever going to be in Britney Spears’s situation?  In what way is the myriad of things she’s been through applicable to any other kid in America?  There are better ways to warn kids away from a partying lifestyle than taking part in the daily public gang-rape of Britney Spears’s life.

The conservatives are right about who should shoulder the blame, however.  Do we put the onus on the producers and agents who thought it was acceptable to market the hymen of a little girl?  The nation full of men who convince themselves that Catholic-schoolgirl-outfit fantasies don’t make them child molesters?  The media that exploited every last second of everything this girl ever did?  The vultures and vampires surrounding her that masqueraded as her friends?  Britney herself for being too stupid and irresponsible to take control over her life?

I vote for the mother.  Forget all the rumors, forget the enabling and exploitation for her own sake, even forget the fact that she’s cashing in from a book about her experiences raising a pop star.  Just look at one thing and one thing only.  Britney’s sixteen-year-old sister Jaime Lynn is pregnant now, and how has Mom reacted?  She’s already sold the rights for the first pictures of the child.  That’s case closed for me.  That should tell everyone what kind of woman the Spears matriarch is, what lessons she instilled in her eldest daughter, and what lessons she’s now instilling her youngest.  How does she defend something like that?  Please tell me that she’s broke and someone in her family desperately needs money for an operation.  Please tell me that.

Britney deserves a break.  It’s hard to feel sympathy for a woman who flakes out on court dates to try to regain custody of her kids, but sympathy by itself is worthless anyway unless it helps someone.  Let’s feel sympathy for Britney because she was manifestly exploited as a child – ostensibly by her mother most of all, if little Jamie Lynn’s circumstances are any indication.

Maybe Britney deserves to have her kids taken away, maybe not.  I would advise family services, however, to take a long look at the parenting skills of the woman who appears to be starting the whole thing all again with another daughter.

Kanye West and Schlinder’s List

How do you define “douchebag?”  How about a self-proclaimed rap star who believes his own press, brags incessantly when he wins awards, and whines incessantly when he doesn’t win awards?  That would be my vote for one definition.  Anyone who thinks they deserve awards for their “art” is not an artist.  Further, Mr. West also played the race card once when doing some of the aforementioned whining.  I.e. “Can’t a black man win an award?  Can’t you give a black man a chance?”

Hey, check this out:  Maybe they just don’t like your music.  Maybe everyone can’t appreciate the aesthetic value in a wonderful lyric such as: “I’m not saying she’s a gold digger/But she ain’t messin’ with no broke nigger.”  Maybe the world just isn’t ready for a rhyme like that.  Maybe Kanye is too far ahead of his time.  Maybe we can’t know the intricate depths of a genius that is Kanye West.

Or maybe the music just sucks.

One almost can’t get an honest opinion in that regard, since most of the music critics seem to be stuck endlessly lauding Mr. West.  Rolling Stone even put him on the cover once with a crown of thorns on his head.  Maybe I’m too dense to understand the connection between Kanye West and Jesus.  The only thing more pathetic than Rolling Stoneshooting that photo was Kanye West agreeing to pose for it.

Then we have the famous incident of the man in question stating, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people,” during the time of Hurricane Katrina.

Wow.  How insightful.  How wonderfully rebellious and bohemian.  Maybe this guy does deserve a bunch of awards and verbal fellatio from magazines like Rolling Stone.  I was under the impression that the torpid response to Katrina was due to inefficient government bureaucracy (including the bungling of Mayor “Chocolate City” Nagin), but Kanye West must be in possession of privileged information.  All this time, it was George Bush sitting in the Oval Office, telling emergency response programs to take their time, because he didn’t care about saving those black people down there.

Okay, I get it.  Kanye West is an idiot.  Why take him seriously?  The thing is, many people didtake him seriously.  I saw adults on TV agreeing with him, with straight faces and everything.  Rolling Stone lauded him as one of the year’s most important people and printed something to the effect that his statement was “what we were all thinking but too afraid to say.”  Really?  Were we all really thinking that?

Okay, how about I say something I’ve been thinking:  Kanye West doesn’t care about underprivileged kids.

See, the amount of money that Mr. West spends on his jewelry, wardrobe, cigars, cars, etc., could be used to help a great many underprivileged kids.  Many of those same underprivileged kids are the ones shelling out what little money they have for his insipid CDs.  In effect, those underprivileged kids make it possible for him to live his life of high fashion and excess.  They’re eating Spaghetti O’s while he struts around in Italian suits pretending that money makes him a man.

Remember the scene at the end of Schlinder’s List when Liam Neeson breaks down and realizes that he could have hawked his watch, his car, and other things to save more lives?  When he’d already saved so many, but then he got to thinking that perhaps he should have done more, that he was obligated as a moral human being to do more?  After all, it’s not exactly a sacrifice to give up a fucking watch to save someone’s life, or even to help a poor kid go to college.

I wonder if Kanye West (or any of his peers who like to bash white politicians for supposedly being apathetic toward minorities) has ever had a moment – perhaps while spending thousands of dollars on shoes and sunglasses and gold chains – like that?

Why It’s Unreasonable to Vote for Barack Obama

It looks as if Barack Obama has a great chance of being the Democratic nominee.  I think this will translate into him stepping into the White House next January, because I don’t see how McCain – with his stay-in-Iraq-a-hundred-years policy – can beat him.  I’m not saying Senator McCain is necessarily wrong; I just don’t think the majority of voters will elect a guy with a policy like that, no matter how many independents the pundits say he can persuade.

 

So Obama, a first-term senator with an amazing record of waffling on votes, is likely to be the commander-in-chief.  A guy who says he would sit down for talks with Iran and Syria “unconditionally.”  Never mind if they’re sponsoring terrorism, never mind if the president of Iran talks about wiping Israel off the map.  I also remember when Obama said he would bomb Pakistan to get to Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.  I’m a dumbass prison inmate, and it would appear that I know more about foreign policy than he does.  I’ve never heard Obama specifically answer one direct question about anything, let alone the really important issues like terrorism, immigration, and how he’s going to pay for his nationalized health care plan.

 

Senator Obama’s a charismatic speaker who is energizing voters and leaving McCain and Clinton in his wake.  I also think that he’s an honest guy who wants good things for this country.  I’m just not certain he knows how to go about it, or that his platform is anything other than pretty rhetoric.  Change and hope, change and hope.  Those are great concepts, but not if they’re abstract and so generalized as to be meaningless.

 

Every time I see an Obama supporter on TV who’s asked why they’re voting for him, they respond with some version of, “I really just think he can energize a lot of people and bring hope and change that we all need.”  If they’re asked to clarify exactly what Obama will change and how he will actualize this hope, they say, “Well, he’s going to nationalize health care and end the War in Iraq.”

 

Really?  Isn’t that precisely what Hillary Clinton’s going to do also?  How can Obama differentiate himself?  What makes him more qualified to do that than Senator Clinton?

 

I think it’s great that many people can get behind Senator Obama, and he can project a good image, and maybe his image can be good for international relations.  That’s important, but does it make a president?  Personally, I don’t want a president who wins a popularity contest; I want one who’s best for the job.  Electing Obama because he’s “energizing voters” is nearly as empty as electing a guy to be high school class president because he’s the captain of the football team who promises to throw neat parties.

 

My sense of reason rebels at the thought of this.  Maybe a change from the policies of the Bush administration is a good thing, but you can despise Bush and still admit that this country and the world are facing serious problems.  Islamic terror is not a chimera the Republican Party has conjured up to frighten people, and it’s not going to magically disappear when Bush leaves the White House.  For those who shriek endlessly about how being in Iraq is making terrorism worse, it might be well to remember that 9/11 happened before we went into Iraq.  What is “change and hope” going to accomplish with people who think murdering civilians – and/or sponsoring those who do – is a viable political tool?

Prison Story I

I guess the idea of initiation is an important one to consider if you’re going to talk about the experience of young men going to prison for the first time.  Prisoners are roughly divided along racial lines.  Some of this actual racism; most of it is just because physical appearance is the easiest way to stereotype people.  Many of us seek companionship and security in such groups, among like-minded (and like-looking) people.  In prison this exaggerated because of the threat of racial conflicts.

 

The ultimate test for being in one of these groups is whether you would side with them in the event of such a conflict.  If you’re white, for instance, it doesn’t really matter whether you’re a skinhead, a Neo-Nazi, an Identity Christian, or just an average Caucasian with no strong proclivities in the matter.  If you’re down with your “people” for a racial confrontation, that earns you a great deal of social status.

 

Another way you might be tested (since a race battle is a relatively rare occasion) is to go on a “mission.”  Within the first few days of being locked up, a supposed representative of one white group or another approached me and asked me to provide myself by doing something simple: taking some cigarette tobacco over to some other white guys in Hole.  To go to the Hole, all I would have to do is refuse to lock up in my cell.  The officers would put me in the Hole for few days, no big deal.  It’s practically inconsequential to someone like me, who’d been at the beginning of a twenty-year-sentence.  I was a skinny, naïve, nineteen-year-old kid, just the type who can usually be talked into this.

 

Of course, you aren’t allowed to take tobacco or anything else to the Hole; you’re strip-searched before they put you there.  So what I was being asked to do was take a tight little bundle of tobacco, rolling papers, and matches wrapped in a plastic bag, and conceal it in my ass with the help of some lotion.  When I was in my new cell in the Hole, I would remove it, pass it along to the guys who would then smoke it.  I could even have some for myself, I was told.

 

Another common mission is for the newcomer to “take someone off the mainline.”  This means publicly beat the hell out of a guy so that he goes to the Hole (you do, as well, of course).  The victim is always someone who has made an enemy.  Either he’s a sex offender, a snitch, or he’s done something disrespectful and needs to be sent a message.  Again, this is only a minor blip compared to being in prison for a felony:  you hit the guy a few times, you get in a little trouble, but you’re out and about again in a week.  I was also asked to do this particular deed once, to an assumed sex offender.

 

I never participated in a test for anyone.  Some of it was because I was afraid (or disgusted), but for the most part, the whole thing had a ring of falsity about it.  I’m pale-skinned, but I’ve never claimed to be a part of any white group.  I wasn’t raised as a white supremacist, I didn’t grow up with such views.  Many white kids come into prison and join these groups solely to fit in, even though they never held any such position on the streets.  I thought that “switching up” like that would make you kind of a pathetic brown-noser.

 

Not only that, but agreeing to one of those missions is like allowing yourself to be taken advantage of.  Most of the time, it’s only the young, skinny kids who are either eager to please or afraid to refuse who are propositioned to do these things.  There’s a name for them: “Mission-boys.”  And being designated as a “boy” who will do favors for the other cons is not exactly a good start for any prisoner.

My Faith in Reason

I generally avoid talking about why I’m in prison because I despise the idea of being seen as someone searching for sympathy, forgiveness, or rationalization.  I want none of those things.  But one thing I do want is for a crime like mine to never, ever happen again.  No one should ever have to be victimized in any way, especially not in the worst way imaginable: murder.  Murder is evil.

As a practicing existentialist, I think that good and evil are most likely creations of mankind, that the root of altruism is nothing more than a genetic predisposition.  This doesn’t devalue morality, however; this makes it infinitely more precious.  I also think that faith is nothing more than the opinion of the person having it, but I do have faith that murder is evil.  And considering that I’m a convicted murderer, it would follow that I myself am evil.

I can’t disagree with that.  I’m not saying murder is bad because I’m suffering the consequences of doing it – I’m saying it’s evil, pure and simple.  I regret what I did because it was tragically unjust to my victim and his family.  As a person who continuously deals with the fact that I am literally the lowliest of human beings and always will be, that I completely deserve to be where I am, I also consider myself a person who aspires to be moral.

To that en, I should not only be punished for what I did, I should try to prevent it from happening again.  I see no way of doing that while incarcerated, other than trying to examine why I committed my crime and revealing that information to others.  When I committed my crime I possessed two traits that I think are shared by almost every convicted felon: a lack of personal responsibility and a lack of the ability to reason.  So if I accept that the mindset that led me to rob a man and subsequently kill him is a common one among people who do similar things, then examining that mindset – especially how and why I discarded it – can possibly be useful in preventing it in other young people.

I think it’s likely that there is no such thing as an objective yardstick of good and evil (a God with commandments, for example), so therefore it is completely and utterly my opinion that murder is evil.  That’s all, my opinion.  It doesn’t county for anything.  It shouldn’t, but that’s what I think.  Furthermore, if there is no objective good and evil, then a statement such as “Murder is evil” can never be anything but a collective opinion of human beings.

I’m pretty sure there aren’t going to be any consequences when I die, that I’ll only be held accountable for what I’ve done here on earth, by worldly forces.  Maybe this is unfair.  Possibly I deserve eternal damnation.  Regardless, I don’t think I’ll receive it, because I don’t think there’s any evidence to support such a fairy-tale notion.  So what business do I have thinking that murder is wrong?  Why should I feel guilt?  Many Christians have told me that since there is no absolute of morality, it is inevitable that I should only be concerned for my own life and no one else’s.  I should refrain from victimizing others solely because there are earthly consequences, not because I think it’s evil.  These Christians consider such a paucity of morality to be the inescapable net result of existentialism.

I completely reject that sort of pop psychology stereotyping.  It’s intellectually lazy.  My opinion stands.  And I may also add that I committed my crime when I still had faith that Jesus Christ had died for my sins.  It is only since I have become a de facto existentialist that I have truly understood why murder is evil, and indeed, what evil really is.

I have concluded the opposite of the Christian values impressed upon me as a child.  Rather than thinking that I’m beloved of God and deserving grace and forgiveness, I’m basing my opinions of morality on the realization that I am not special, that I never was.  I have always been and always will be nothing more than an ordinary human being, the exact same as a billion others.  A creation of natural selection, a primate with a big brain and pretensions.  I’m not saying human beings are worthless creatures of muck; I believe in the power of the individual and the preciousness of every single life.  I’m just saying that no one’s life is worth more than anyone else’s life.

This is so because such humility is a necessary component of a rational mind.  Reason leads us to this conclusion.  It is simply irrational to think that you have more value than another of your human cousins, just as it is irrational when racists assign more or less value to a person because of something arbitrary like the amount of melanin in their skin.  If we are all equal in value, that means we are all entitled to the same things.  For instance, the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  Victimization is evil because it deprives another person of that right.  Victimization is evil because any potential victim is equal in value to the potential victimizer.

I say “potential” because once you victimize, once you attempt to elevate yourself to having more value than other human being, you forfeit your self-value.  By subscribing to the illusion that you have more value than others, that your rights are more important than the rights of others, that your needs are greater than the needs of others, you become evil.  You become a victimizer who thinks he can do whatever he wants because he is either selfish, powerful, or both.  This is an irrational position because, again, your need to victimize cannot possibly outweigh any other person’s need to not be a victim.  No one has the right to take away the rights of others.

Of course, I am an idiot.  Almost everyone lives their life without every significantly victimizing someone.  Most people have no need of hearing what I’m saying now – what I should have realized as an eighteen-year-old.  Most people are probably saying, “No shit, Sherlock,” or some variation thereof.  I have no excuses.  I’m not saying I should have been given special instructions or that I needed extra attention to keep me away from committing a crime, or that my parent didn’t raise me correctly.  I had the same knowledge of the difference between right and wrong as anyone else did; I simply didn’t use it.  This is solely my fault.

But the fact is that people like me have done these things, and people like me continue to do them.  Punishing us is necessary and just, but it’s only the first step.  It must be prevented from happening in the first place.  Punishment won’t do that.  People have been “deterred” by prison, retribution, and even the death penalty throughout all of history, and they still commit crimes.

If the promise of a very harsh punishment won’t stop a criminal from committing a crime, it stands to reason that an abstract rule certainly isn’t going to do a great job of it.  For some people, a rule is not a good enough deterrent, and neither is a punishment for breaking the rule, or a reward for adhering to it.  Everyone knows that robbery and murder are against the rules, but people still do these things anyway because thier reason for doing them has more value than the victim’s right to be left alone.  They need to be taught that this is not so, that it’s pure stupidity to think in such a way.

In my case, I never truly understood why robbing someone to get money was wrong until much later.  I thought that if I could get away with it, that was all that mattered.  I was thinking only of myself.  I believed that my life and my desires had more value than anyone else’s.  That was precisely the heart of the problem.  That’s what led me to do it, even though I knew that it was explicitly against the rules.

It is my opinion that had I been capable of rationalizing morality in this manner when I was a teenager, I never would have considered robbery or any other form of victimization to be an appropriate act.  I would have recoiled – as I do now – at even the thought of becoming a victimizer.  Victimizers represent evil; they should be battled and restrained and modified.  To prevent someone from attaining the mindset that allows them to victimize, or to correct such a mindset, reason is needed.  Not blind obedience, but reason.  Using reason imparts to us the gift of a rational mind, which is by necessity a humble mind.  And humility negates any justification to become a victimizer.

Punishment as Deterrence for Prisoners

I wonder if Democrats know that prisoners almost universally support their party?

It’s true.  Despite that we can’t vote, I’d say prisoners follow politics and the current presidential race with comparable percentages to the population at large.  Most prisoners have an inkling of what’s going on, what candidate said what, who’s ahead in the polls, who they want to win.  Also like a great many of the average population, most prisoners can only comment on generalizations.  They don’t delve too deeply into the subject, they don’t know the candidates’ voting records, and they can hardly explain the substantive differences between Democrats and Republicans, let alone the differences among nominees in the same party.

One thing is under general consensus among prisoners, however:  Democrats equal good and Republicans equal bad.

As I said, my guess is that most of the prisoners who subscribe to this view couldn’t site any evidence to support the claim.  The most I’ve heard is that “Democrats are easier on sentencing and drug laws,” and “Republicans took away parole,” and “Democrats will support more programs to help prisoners.”

I think most of these ideas are bogus.  Democrats have gotten “tough on crime” as much as Republicans – as much as any politician trying to please the public.  As a prisoner, I’d be more interested in a politician who helps America become wealthy, stable, and secure.  This will help everyone, even prisoners.

As humorous as it is sometimes to hear prisoners act like we’re an ordinary voting bloc that deserves special attention and promises from politicians, I do think there are valid points here.  There absolutely should be more programs for prisoners to get educated, learn vocational skills, and to kick drug addiction.  Locking people up is not going to solve the problem of why many people commit crimes in the first place.  No matter how many people we put in prison, no matter how long the sentences get, prisoners are never, ever, going to wake up and say, “Wow, I better get my life together and stay out of trouble, because that harsh sentencing law has taught me a lesson.”

Trust me.  The recidivism rate is so high because when a prisoner gets out, he often doesn’t have anything else to do.  He doesn’t know how to do anything else.  He doesn’t know the first thing about how to be responsible.  And being punished by sitting in the joint hasn’t changed in that regard.

I’m not complaining or thinking that I deserve anything.  I’m not saying society makes criminals, that us prisoners are victims of a harsh world, or any such nonsense.  I deserve to be where I am.  When people commit felonies, when they victimize others, they should be punished by incarceration.

But again, incarceration is only a punishment.  It doesn’t deter people from joining gangs or turning to crime to pay for drug habits.  It doesn’t improve the issue when the prisoner is behind bars, so when he’s released, nothing has changed except that he’s a little savvier and more tattooed.  He gets out and moves back to the same neighborhood, with same buddies doing the same things, and the same problems that led him to the joint in the first place.

Locking up felons is of course necessary, so when politicians are queried about how they’ll protect people from crime, they give the appropriate answer.  I wish there were politicians who had the courage to say something like: “Let’s work together and figure out a way to bring the crime rate down, rather than bringing the incarceration rate up.  That would protect the people of this country.”