Have you ever been in a situation where everything spins out of control?
Have you been there, watching events move by, unable to find any kind of break, screaming "STOP!" at the top of your lungs...
Yet, nothing slows, nothing stops... and your life is taken completely out of your hands, flipped upside down, and kept dangled in front of you, just out of reach? Imagine...
You're sitting there at a vegetarian kiosk in northern California. You've spent the last several weeks squatting, hitchhiking, protesting, kicking it with some good, radical, free-thinking people. You're taking a small break, heading down to San Francisco to see what's up with the city life before getting back into the forest to continue the fight against the logging industry.
An old friend is there, and you reminisce about some old people in an old place.
Then, all of a sudden, you're approached by a police officer. They know your name and it unnerves you. You're searched, and they check out your tattoos. The three roses and vibrant green vines trailing down your arm gives up the game. You're placed in handcuffs, driven to a gulag, and subject to various indignities before being locked into a small concrete box with nothing but a steel slab attached to the wall and a busted toilet.
Despite the various colored activities of your past, this is your first time in a jail cell. You're cold, you're confused, you're afraid. You've been using some pretty strong mind-altering substances for quite a while now and you're not really sure what's happening - if any of this is even real. And no one is telling you why you're even there.
After a while you adjust, a bit dazed when they finally tell you what they think you did.
They tell you that you killed a couple of your friends.
They're going to seek the death penalty.
They say that it happened in Texas, so they're gonna ship you there.
You have to wait because some psychopath just took out the World Trade Center. You know you've never killed anyone, but it doesn't seem to matter.
You're shipped back like human cattle, trussed up and herded through the airport by a phalanx of soldiers. You're still pretty much in shock, by this pretty callous handling of your LIFE.
What can you do?
You go to stand trial, forced to put your trust into a system you've been told all along works.
You KNOW it doesn't, but this doesn't matter either.
You have no choice. You're a bum. Broke. No one to turn to. You're stuck with legal representation who aren't paid enough to care about you or your case. They barely work on it at all. No investigation, they barely do anything with the witnesses on the stand.
So it's really no surprise... or at least it shouldn't be... when eventually you're convicted. More "evidence" is presented by the state. You're a social miscreant (anarchist). You have no redeeming qualities. Your attorneys call NO witnesses to refute this. Twelve of your "peers" deem you unfit to live, and these people you've never met before sentence you to death.
Afterwards you are transferred to prison to wait for the axe to finally fall. Not a normal prison, a control unit. Super-Segregation.
You're placed into solitary confinement, isolated from the rest of humanity for the rest of your life.
You are still in shock.
The situation is hard to grasp and you haven't quite registered it yet.
And then you do.
You've spent the last several months degraded, harassed, oppressed,
provoked, trampled upon... Life becomes 22 hours in a concrete tomb.
The bite of the handcuffs every time you're allowed out of it.. Meals unfit for human consumption.
The glass that will eternally separate you from your loved ones. They've taken most everything.
They want what's left: your humanity. Then your life.
And in the end, you are given two choices: you can sit on your bunk and accept it. Or you can fight back with everything you have.
Imagine that. Try to put yourself there.. What would you do? That's what's happened to my life. What do I do? I fight.
But I just don't fight for myself. I fight,because I know it's wrong.
I fight because it's happening to me; and because it shouldn't happen to anybody.
It could happen to you.
In Struggle and Solidarity,
Steven Woods #999427
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