Welcome. My name is Jeremiah John, sf/f author & activist.I tell liberationist stories.. . . More About Me
In November of 2003, my partner and I committed nonviolent civil disobedience to close the notorious School of the Americas along with ninety-six others: nuns, priests, doctors, and lawyers. We did this because ten of the fourteen dictators who seized power in Latin America from 1958 to the present graduated from this school: it's been used by the CIA to undermine democratically elected governments in the name of US business interests. Because of our misdemeanor action of cutting the lock on a small pedestrian gate, we served six months in federal prison—me in Terre Haute, IN.
Below are letters, poems, and communiques from my six months in Terre Haute Federal Prison.
These are the words which I spoke to the judge just before he sentenced me to six months in prison, a year of probation, and a $1000 fine, in 2003.
Your Honor: I am here before you because I violated a law. In front of Fort Benning Georgia I cut a lock and injured federal property.
Salvation in Ill-Fitting Blue Pants.
This is my testimony, written for Geez Magazine, about my conversion in prison.
I suppose all of you have heard rumor of amazing spiritual forces at work in dark, sardonic me: a Stretch Armstrong, if you will, caught between the forces of good and evil. For those of you who have recognized my divided nature this may come as no surprise. For some, it is a bearded Marx or Kropotkin sitting on the one shoulder in a posture of buddhist peace—the picture of the earthly utopian vision, while upon the other shoulder a horde of televangelists twist and writhe in a heaving mass of snakelike coils and snatch at my rarefied (strictly metaphorical) soul with lizard tongues.
For the Buddhist, hell is very tangible. The unenlightened life is hell. Souls continually recirculate through hellish life after life until enlightenment, upon which they escape to a state of oneness, infinite compassion, etc. This infinitely repeated cycle of life, death, and birth is called samsara: the Wheel of Suffering.
“People think television is a revolutionary invention, but it’s also a revolutionary experiment in consciousness that’s not all good.” – Thomas Doane-Swanson
“You know what they need to do with them blonde-hair, blue-eye devils? They need to kill ‘em right when they drop out they momma ass.” --My joy of a bunkie
“And I survived because I made a point of forgetting . . . I did not count the days or the weeks or the months. Time is an illusion that only makes us pant.
One of those things which incessantly tormented me when I first arrived was the continual feeling of eyes on the back of my head.
“I still feel funny watching movies without my wife and kids . . .”
. . . A child is crying and screaming, dragged by her mother away from the visiting room . . .
I slunk
noiselessly
candy on my breath
past a weeping violin.
I tore out my smile
and rolled it like a cigarette
smoldering gently.
He began to smoke
and my guilt subsided
“’I would like to know which is worse – to be raped a hundred times by Negro pirates, to have a buttock cut off, run the gauntlet among Bulgarians, be flogged and hanged in an auto-da-té, be dissected
