Hotep,
I was talking
to my son while he was preparing my grandson for football practice. The sound of his fatherhood continues to
instill a great sense of pride within my being.
At the same time, when I hear his fatherly instructions, and my
grandson’s obedient responses, I become overwhelmed by the reality of my
political handicap.
Capital
punishment and mass incarceration cripples a free society with the
psychological effects of knowing one poor decision can lead to spending the rest
of your life living in captivity.
Everyone you know and love continues to thrive – making new memories
day-after-day, while your eyes and ears absorb the same walls and routines of
day-to-day life inside of the box.
Once the gates
close and the steel doors are locked, failure eats away at any aspirations to
be more than your circumstance, similar to a terminal illness deteriorating its
host. There are no light switches,
thermostats, or windows for me to control.
Prison extracts that most minute forms of independence – making success
seem like a distant pipe dream.
Prison rarely
grants the opportunity to unleash success from the shackled grips of
failure. As a first time offender, I
long for the second chance to show the most extreme failures can entail
progression. Rehabilitation for death
row prisoners in North Carolina is unsettling to a society who trusts that their
political leaders’ core values are what fuels the potent engine of justice.
These same
leaders ignite their megaphones and political platforms with the malarkey of
capital punishment being a justifiable deterrent to crime: the need to kill, in
order to prevent murder. They will
convince their constituents that it is more suitable to build more prisons than
schools.
Underplaying schoolteachers
while cops get a pass for escalating black death rates. If our kids are not being taught properly; if
they’re not staying in school, they are destined to join the ever-growing
population of mass incarceration. Some
will even meet the demise of a poisonous cocktail that the twisted political
leaders will promulgate as humane.
Looking at the
free-world from a slit five inches high, I can clearly see the generations of
my son and grandson resisting defeat while in the sights of capitalists eager
to fill up their prison spaces. Death
row prisoners, on the other hand, know the disappointment of defeat, yet some
have proven rehabilitation through prison programs like: social psychology,
creative writing, journalism, and the chess club.
In most cases,
success is stimulated by failure. The
best way to understand success is to know that it is subjective. The successes of Barack Obama, Michael Jordan
and Jay-Z are templates of what can be accomplished when your work ethic speaks
louder than your proclamations.
In life, we
all fail to some degree. As my grandson
takes the field for his Pop Warner football team, I am inclined to see that he
can drop a pass, and then come back to the huddle for the very next play. If he stumbles before making a tackle, he can
still recover to make a game-saving stop.
However, some
prisoners take their place in the stadium of outside competition – winning
through our diligence to change the game.
Others may choose to sit in the parking lot, listening to the game on
the radio. To fail, and end up in
prison, could mean the end of your opportunities to fail again.
Stay Up,
MannofStat
Copyright © 2016
by Leroy Elwood Mann
No comments:
Post a Comment