This letter was written by a person incarcerated at Kern Valley.
I’ve learned in life that, sometimes a very serious situation can bring about unity, love, and forgiveness. Sometimes, when we experience a very horrific situation, there’s a diamond in the rough. That diamond is how people start and do amend relationships. We learn to value life better, treasure each other, let bygones be bygones.
It’s hard to witness prisoners suffer for visits from loved ones, family matters, all lives matters. I figure there are many people in the society in far worse situations than me. People living in the streets, homeless families, hunger, no medical attention, no clothes, showers and toiletries. It could be better and it could be worse.
Poor people and people of color in worse situations when their situation was already dire and bleak. COVID-19 is just a national crisis. Regardless, some prisoners, officers and staff skeptical of receiving the vaccines, for good reasons.
A history would have it, those few in authority in CDC and CDCR have proven to be untrustworthy and specifically when it comes to diseases, using Blacks as guinea pigs when it come to syphilis, a very infectious venereal disease. American or Amerikkka has a long and intense history of racism, torture and regarding Blacks and people of color as property, less than human, second- and third-class citizens, “just look around us.”
George Floyd and Chauvin case, America or the racist authorities, people figures of American or as Americans target blacks, harass, misuse Blacks through ongoing, disparate treatment, systematic, disproportionate treatment on all levels. Even during the pandemic, news reports, PBS, and history tells us, Blacks aren’t being treated fairly as to vaccine distribution and Black Lives Matter, but only at the bottom of the totem pole.
You asked “what has it been like to be inside during this time?” Being Black inside in American at a whole is a pandemic, a COVID 1-100 pandemic. As I see it, I was born a slave and the slave ship is called Amerikkka, right along with the Nina, the Pinta, and Santa Maria. If your professor is worth her weight in historical integrity, then she knows what I’m talking about.
The real pandemic is not COVID-19, it’s and American brainwashing through media on all levels. It will take the net of God Almighty to cure this mental, systematic pandemic we face in our Amerikkka. What has it been like inside? In a phrase, “CDCR-systematic hell,” to say the least. Like General Custer’s last standing; David, and Goliath, but David has no spiritual support; Noah’s Ark and if you have the vaccine, you have a space on the ship.
Inside has allowed me to contemplate deeply about who, what, why, and when I am, my purpose, people’s purpose, and the human purpose of man and human kind. I find being human being is my true value. The who, what, why, when and anywhere I am, going to Mars, won’t change that. This pandemic won’t change that!
Human being is the worth for me, moral values define me and my purpose in life, moved principles in a balancing application, to manage me first. I’ve learned that I’m like a “Sponge Bob,” a human sponge that must be very careful of what media, environmental influences, material or other things I’m being soaked in, because I’m affected on both a conscious and unconscious level.
As I see it, the pandemic is both a blessing and a curse that has always been a part of the human experience, a type of shock therapy and a dose of medicine. People need to wake up to the reality that we are all on Noah’s ship together, and the ocean waves get really tough sometimes. It’s scary, it’s tough, and some of us will need a hug to make it through, but let’s ride this ship of rough waters together through it all.
We must understand that people respond different to the ride on Noah’s Ark, some have the mental training of the captain, many don’t; some are front line passengers and most aren’t. Scared or brave, nervous, confident, the captain experience in us and guiding us will see us through. The cup is half full, not half empty! Waters are rough, we’ll make it.
