December 7, 2005 - Pearl Harbor Day

Dear Sis~

Pearl Harbor Day has rolled around again, except nowadays it's an amicable invasion of Hondas & Toyotas, Sonys & Mitsubishis, Panasonics & Nissans. Ford and General Motors are lurching toward bankruptcy, fatally wounded by a decades-long lack of corporate vision and leadership at the top, combined with onerous, myopic union intransigence from below. Bad combination! The Japanese simply offer better products at better prices, and as Adam Smith would say, the power of the free marketplace does the rest. Corporate Darwinism in action ...

We went on "quarterly lockdown" on Monday, where we will remain for the next two-three weeks. The entire prison is confined to their cells while roving groups of guards, accompanied by the K-9 drug-sniffing units, go from cellblock to cellblock (or from pod to pod; in the "new school" prison system they are called "pods" instead of cellblocks) searching (tearing up) our cells looking for "contraband" and/or any other "excess property." This is really an opportunity for al the guards to earn lots of overtime pay; just in time to pay for all the Christmas stuff they'll be buying. We always have a lockdown in early December, just before Christmas...

Outside we've got a light dusting of snow; earlier today I was looking out through my horizontal slit window (5' wide and 4 feet long), watching the crows strut around on the ground, occasionally pecking at the snow. They're probably pissed that I haven't been showing p in the yard to feed them their hot dogs, sausages and Bologna. For the next few weeks, they're on their own ...

I read and enjoyed the notes posted to my blog from one of the "dcdramagrrls" (I love their little visual icon, the picture of that saucy red-headed gal sliding seductively down the fireman's pole. That woman had some serious curves!) I'm glad they were fighting to help Rob Lovitt. Speaking of Rob, they brought him back from Greensville and put him in the cellblock next door, in administrative confinement, with the other non-death row prisoners, pending his classification to his permanent prison. On my last day out in the yard, last Sunday, I got to holler at him. His new cell looks down on the yards, the same yards he'd been pacing in for the last 5 years. Now he's on the "other side", among the "living" (i.e., non-death row prisoners) looking out at us. Talk about a dramatic turnaround! That's what each one of us hopes for in our own cases ... that someday, somehow, fate, luck and circumstances will converge to kick us off death row and into general population where we can exhale and try to live a normal life (normal by chain gang standards, anyway). Unfortunately in Virginia, very, very few of us will actually realize that dream. The mortality rate for this state's death row is, by far, the highest in the nation. If you come to the row in Virginia, you willl be executed ...

On that somber note I'll close this up and post it.
Love & Peace
Bill