Offer of Correction (by Polish Avenger)

Polish Avenger – A software-engineering undergraduate sentenced to 25 years because his friend was shot dead during a burglary they were committing. In Arizona, if a burglar gets killed, the accomplices can get 25-year sentences.

I may have given a wrong impression in some of the blogs I penned earlier this year. Those reading my posts will notice I am generally a cheerful fellow who tries to make the best of things. This doesn’t mean that conditions here aren’t so bad. Or that I’m at the mythical country-club prison we’ve all heard about. (Just where is that place, anyway? Atlantis, methinks!)

I would therefore like to offer the following correction. Nay, this is no country club, except perhaps in Dante or Solzhenitsyn. My irrepressible bouncy mood isn’t a barometer of outward conditions. Prison in general, and the Arizona system in particular, is purposely designed for punishment. Atop that are sundry types of indifference, neglect, and subhuman treatment. It’s the hellhole they intend it to be.

And lest I be accused of whining, I do completely deserve my stay here. There are plenty of hellholes out in the free world, too. Crap jobs, loveless marriages, dysfunctional families, spirals of addiction. Freedom doesn’t necessarily mean someone is free. The invisible chains of a thousand worldly fetters and social obligations weigh down the world as effectively as our stainless steel leg irons.

So once again I plead the question and hypothesis of “Birdsong and Razor Wire” – despite whatever is trying to drag you down, what sort of day – and life – will you choose to have? Do we let everything get the better of us, or do we rise above it? Do we take up the mantle of the Greek Stoic philosophers who teach us that external causes are inevitable and thus to be patiently endured? Do we stand up, stubbornly cheerful, and cast the negative right back into the yellowed teeth of adversity? Well, dammit, I do.

If I can do it here, odds are you can too!

Click here for Polish Avenger’s grotesque previous blog: Shit Slingers IV

I'm doing a reading from Hard Time with the author of Try Me, Farah Damji, in London on 23 August · 18:30 - 20:00 at:
The Gallery, Stoke Newington Library
Stoke Newington Church Street, London N16, 0JS
Click here for further info.

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Shaun Attwood