November 26, 2009 - Thanksgiving

Dear Sis~

This is my 39th Thanksgiving behind bars, including Youth Hall, Kendall's Children's Home, Okeechobee Boy's School and the Halfway House, since 1966, a sad commentory on a squandered life.  I still hug tightly those distant memories of the handful of Thanksgiving meals we enjoyed together as children -before it all went bad - with Uncle Bill and Aunt Ann there at the table, and Dad in his wheelchair supervising the big turkey basting in the oven, Uncle Bill, a beer in his hand, making his special gravy.  Life, for me, was still full of promise, potential and hope; of those, only hope remains ...

I took a break from my current legal project (gotta rest the writing hand) and watched A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, an animated revisionist history of the Pilgrims' encounters with the Native Americans.  It was all warm and fuzzy, ending with Indians and Pilgrims happy and smiling, living in harmony.  Now, I like ol' Charlie Brown as much as anyone, but that propaganda was too much to stomach.  Left unsaid were the nonstop betrayals, thefts, rapes, murders, enslavements and genocide of every tribe, one by one, by waves of Europeans as they stole the continent away.  That kind of fake "hisotry" is why so many Americans are so abysmally ignorant of the true (and blood-drenched) underpinnings of our nation.  I'm as patriotic as the next guy, but I believe in reality, not in glossing over facts or living in a fantasy world.  We (Americans) are what we are.  A perfect example is the fact that a large majority of Americans will tell you, with a straight face, that we are "a peace-loving nation", and they actually beleve it.  In reality we ar the most war-like and warring country in the last 160 years, by far.  We are always at war with someone, somewhere (but we've always got a "good reason".)  Few Americans even know (or will believe) that from 1895 or so, to say, 1960, we invaded and/or occupied about 40 countries (some of them numerous times), mostly right in our back yard (Haiti, Panama, Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Nicaraqua, the Dominican Repiblic, The Phillipines, Guatemala, China, El Salvador, ad nauseum), overthrowing duly-elected governments and installing our own chosen right-wing dictators at rifle point.  Just think back to say, 1960, and count each year, right up to today.  We were at war almost every single year with someone, right up to today (Iraq and Afghanistan).  And that's not even counting the covert governmental overthrows we engineered with the CIA (Argentina, Chile, Iran, etc...) But these "Inconvenient facts" are simply not taught to our kids in school.  You have to learn this stuff on your own, assuming you care enough to do so...

They moved seven guys from here to the "main" death row across the river at Union Correctional Institute last week.  There are 320 guys over there, about 65 here.  As guys over there die (we have an inordinately high cancer death rate on death row for some reason) or are executed or have their sentences reduced to life, they move guys from here to there.  Meanwhile, we got two new guys on my floor here in the last 2 weeks.  So, as some guys depart, others appear to fill the void.  Isn't that the way of the world?

Love & Peace,
Bill