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In My Underwear

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When I was in prison—a famous prison journalist, published author and statewide renowned jailhouse lawyer—I would tell my wife (and most anyone else who would suffer through the listening) that if I was released from prison in my underwear in the middle of New York City, I would find a way to survive.

As Dierks Bentley’s song says, “what was I thinkin’”?

I was finally released in 2006 after serving more than 40 years (in some pretty dark, dangerous places) and I didn’t have on much more than my underwear when I walked out of the prison into my wife’s arms.

But what I did have was an upscale high rise condo (beautifully decorated) in which to live, a network of middle/upper class friends of my wife that embraced my reentry into the free world, and the financial resources to get the computer and legal skills at a local community college I so desperately needed to secure employment in the legal profession.

In effect, I virtually had every opportunity for a successful reentry into the free community made available to me by my wife. I didn’t have to worry about surviving in New York City in my underwear.

Still, after 40 years in a confined environment, surviving in the free community was no easy task—psychological adjustments had to be made, learning how to work in a professional setting had to be achieved, and developing the personal and social skills necessary to navigate in and about the nation’s fourth largest city had to be honed.

Believe me that free world adjustment was much harder than the ten years I spent in a maximum security cell or the five years I spent in a general prison population in what was called “the bloodiest prison in America.”

That brings me to the heart of this post.

ABC News carried a report on April 10, 2020 about inmates being released from “Locked Up to Locked Out” – inmates walking out of prison into a society in virtual lockdown because of the coronavirus pandemic. Some were released just weeks before the Covid virus effectively shut the free world down causing them to lose those initial successful reentry gains—job, place to live, and the prospect of a good, decent, law-abiding future.

Then Covid arrived, and the bottom of their world suddenly, and without much warning, fell out—no job, no place to stay, bills to pay, and a truck load of other concerns staring them in the face. Granted, the average person firmly established in the free world before Covid is now facing the same problems and concerns, but at least they have a network of friends, family and resources that allows them to  face the Covid challenges with some support.

The fresh-out-prison individual does not have these personal and psychological support mechanisms. They are pretty much alone—alone like being in a foxhole in the middle of a war without a gun. They do not even have the “going back to prison” option. Those facilities are now, or will become, human death traps. At least in the free world there are masks, surgical gloves, halfway houses, and the local food bank the help the newly released inmates survive the Covid pandemic.

I feel empathy for these guys. I still pray for those I left behind and will now pray for those who must face the challenges of surviving in a world being ravaged by a deadly pandemic.

Think about being in your underwear in middle of New York City, alone, and you will know what these guys are up against.

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Stupidity

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Like garbage, there is an endless supply of this stuff.

A few examples are in order.

The former Acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly who spent $243,000 of taxpayer money to take a 35-hour journey to Guam just so he could tell the crew of the USS Theodore Roosevelt about how “stupid” and traitorous that beloved captain, Brett Crozier, had been for publicly disclosing the threat the Covid 19 virus posed to the ship’s crew. Modly was lucky to get off the ship and back to shores of the USA where he was forced to resign for being stupid.

And then there was Roseanne Barr talking to Norm MacDonald informing his listeners about what the Covid 19 virus is.

“You know what [Covid 19] is, Norm?” Roseanne explained, utterly awed by her own perception of brilliance. “I think they’re just trying to get rid of all my generation. The boomer ladies that, you know, that inherited their, you know, are widows. They inherited the money so they got to go wherever the money is and figure out a way to get it away from people.”

Yes, we know, Roseanne – take another Thorazine and get some rest, girl.

Let us not forget Bill O’Reilly, the former intellectual stalwart at Fox News, who recently told another Fox News giant, Sean Hannity, that there should be little, or no social concern for those who have died from the Covid 19 virus because they were “damaged” people who were on “their last legs” in life.

This idiot, who lends new flavor to stupidity, actually told Hannity that a “simple man tells the truth.”

And then there is the grizzled old man living in rural America who walks around the local grocery without a mask or gloves coughing through tobacco-stained lungs as he stacks cases of Coors Light into a grocery cart.

“Would you like a mask, sir?” a passing customer asks.

“What do I want a mask for,” the man in the dirty jeans (don’t even think about his underwear) contemptuously replies. “I don’t believe in that hoax-virus bullshit. You must be one them fucking MSNBC Democrats.”

The old man left the store, with half-dozen coughs and million aerosols lingering behind in the store, and got into his 15-year-old F-150 truck. He wondered aloud if he had enough beer to get him through Tucker, Ingram and Hannity later that night.

Stupidity.

It is hopelessly etched into the DNA of humankind.

But it is interesting to think about which dating app could link the grizzled old man with Roseanne.

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Perspective

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The Covid 19 virus claims an American life roughly every 9.5 minutes. Today or tomorrow more than 10,000 will have succumbed to the virus.

That’s a lot of death whose tentacles reach out across a wide spectrum of Americans with grief and other tragic consequences. There’s no way to minimize, much less rationalize, the personal and community harm this deadly virus has inflicted and will continue to inflict upon America.

But with the specter (and fear) of death lingering over the American landscape, there is a need for a world view perspective about the ravages, and, yes, the unfairness of death.

One in four children in Africa will not reach the age of 15 and one in ten will be claimed by death before the age of five.

In 2018, UNICEF reported that an estimate 6.5 million children worldwide died before the age of 15—or roughly 1 child every five seconds. An estimated 5.4 million of these children died before the age of five with newborns representing half of those deaths.

Worse yet, UNICEF reported that 56 million children under the age of five will die before 2030 with half of them being newborns.

80 percent of the 2017 child deaths occurred in two regions of the world: sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia.

These children died from lack of access to clean water, sanitation, proper nutrition and basic health services—conditions that are incubators for bacteria, disease, viruses, and a host of other causes of death.

If a child was dying every five seconds in America, would we call it a pandemic?

There is no fair or reasonable answer to this question, especially in a time when a “virus crisis” is crippling the nation.

But it should create a pause for perspective.

Covid 19 is lethal, no doubt about that – but it is the fear the virus produces that is worse than the prospect of death itself. The virus kills in a slow, gripping, crippling sort of way—one can only hope that the supply of morphine is readily available to ease the process of death. “Comfort care,” it is called.

Still, in the back of my mind, there lingers the image of a child—bloated stomach, skin and bones, and worse, eyes that are vacant and lost—to put this “crisis” in perspective. The sub-Saharan African mother will indescribably grieve over the passing of her child, and for all the pre-death misery the child endured. And no one will call it a crisis.

None of us will get out of this world alive.

But, with so many images and stories of death surrounding us as we isolate in the comfort of our homes, a little perspective is in order.

We’re not the only ones suffering from the rigors of death.

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The Legacy

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“Your mother will not be coming home, Son,” Father speaks. “She never regained consciousness last night. She belongs to the unknown now.”

“You and the generation before you, Father, gave us this nightmare,” Son replies. “This will forever be your legacy for all time.”

Father removes his head from his palms, staring off into the early dusk from the porch. He picks up Thomas Wolfe’s book, “You Can’t Go Home Again,” and turns to the page that his Father once read to him.

“Son, let me read to you what Thomas Wolfe wrote to my Father’s generation,” Father says.

“Child, child, have patience and belief, for life is many days, and each present hour will pass away. Son, son, you have been mad and drunken, furious and wild, filled with hatred and despair, and all the dark confusions of the soul – but so have we. You found the earth too great for your one life, you found your brain and sinew smaller than the hunger and desire that fed on them – but it has been this way with all men. You have stumbled on in darkness, you have been pulled in opposite directions, you have faltered, you have missed the way, but, child, this is the chronicle of the earth. And now, because you have known madness and despair, and because you will grow desperate again before you come to evening, we who have stormed the ramparts of the furious earth and been hurled back, we who have been maddened by the unknowable and bitter mystery of love, we who have hungered after fame and savored all of life, the tumult, pain, and frenzy, and now sit quietly by our windows watching all that henceforth never more shall touch us – we call upon you to take heart, for we can swear to you that these things pass.”

Son stares at his broken Father, that familiar wisp of hair casting a shadow over his furrowed brow.

“The broken heart of Mother being gone will never pass, Father,” Son says. “Some wounds heal and scar – others never heal. The sins of this Pandemic will leave wounds beyond healing – and they will be the legacy of your generation, Father.”

Father looks up at Son. He stares deep into the soul of the Son’s wounds.

“It may be the legacy of my generation that we indeed made the storms now tearing our lives apart,” Father says, pausing. “But it will be the legacy of your generation that you did not heed the warnings of the storms approaching.”

COVID 19 will be a terrible legacy for all of mankind—those who made it, those who ignored it, and those who mocked it.

Father turns away.

Pictures on the big-screen television show dead bodies being loaded into a refrigerated 18-wheeler. The bodies will be laid side-by-side before being stacked.

Those images will never pass, not in Father or Son’s lifetimes.

So, where do we go from here?

We survive.

Until the end.

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Perspective.

Uncategorized ,

The Covid 19 virus claims an American life roughly every 9.5 minutes. Today or tomorrow more than 10,000 will have succumbed to the virus.

That’s a lot of death whose tentacles reach out across a wide spectrum of Americans with grief and other tragic consequences. There’s no way to minimize, much less rationalize, the personal and community harm this deadly virus has inflicted and will continue to inflict upon America.

But with the specter (and fear) of death lingering over the American landscape, there is a need for a world view perspective about the ravages, and, yes, the unfairness of death.

One in four children in Africa will not reach the age of 15 and one in ten will be claimed by death before the age of five.

In 2018, UNICEF reported that an estimate 6.5 million children worldwide died before the age of 15—or roughly 1 child every five seconds. An estimated 5.4 million of these children died before the age of five with newborns representing half of those deaths.

Worse yet, UNICEF reported that 56 million children under the age of five will die before 2030 with half of them being newborns.

80 percent of the 2017 child deaths occurred in two regions of the world: sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia.

These children died from lack of access to clean water, sanitation, proper nutrition and basic health services—conditions that are incubators for bacteria, disease, viruses, and a host of other causes of death.

If a child was dying every five seconds in America, would we call it a pandemic?

There is no fair or reasonable answer to this question, especially in a time when a “virus crisis” is crippling the nation.

But it should create a pause for perspective.

Covid 19 is lethal, no doubt about that – but it is the fear the virus produces that is worse than the prospect of death itself. The virus kills in a slow, gripping, crippling sort of way—one can only hope that the supply of morphine is readily available to ease the process of death. “Comfort care,” it is called.

Still, in the back of my mind, there lingers the image of a child—bloated stomach, skin and bones, and worse, eyes that are vacant and lost—to put this “crisis” in perspective. The sub-Saharan African mother will indescribably grieve over the passing of her child, and for all the pre-death misery the child endured. And no one will call it a crisis.

None of us will get out of this world alive.

But, with so many images and stories of death surrounding us as we isolate in the comfort of our homes, a little perspective is in order.

We’re not the only ones suffering from the rigors of death.

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Copyright © 2019 Jodie Sinclair| Author