cringe day, marchipelago 18, 41 a.b. ...
woke up this morning oddly... afraid.
i couldn't remember any bad dreams. i couldn't recall having eaten anything spicy or heavy before going to sleep for the night. i was simply suddenly awake and... afraid.
i'm not afraid often. it took me a moment to figure out exactly what it was i was feeling. i was surprised when i figured out it was fear....
and once i got beyond feeling my feeling and giving it a name, i was surprised again when i got to the thoughts flitting through my head which seem to have been responsible....
thoughts about the 3500 or more cubans and other illegal immigrants locked up in US prisons even though they've never been convicted of a crime, never had a trial, and may never, ever know freedom again....
thoughts about how people accused of terrorism by the US government have been convicted on the basis of secret evidence they could neither see, rebut, or otherwise challenge....
thoughts about how certain US agencies can seize a person's possessions authorities merely suspect were purchased with money obtained illegally even though the person has not been charged or convicted of any crime. it's then that person's responsibility to prove that they didn't use ill-gotten money to purchase these possessions with....
thoughts about how the "3 strikes and you're out" law has led to some people being condemned to life in prison because they stole a pack of cigarettes....
thoughts about how there was this woman who was determined to chronicle her daughter's life and took 40,000 photos of her daughter and one or two of the most recent photos happened to show her daughter showering and now Mom's facing 10 years in prison for child pornography after a photo developer alerted the authorities to her crime....
thoughts of the countless cases i've read in the paper over the course of the last few years in which learned and well-respected professor X lost his job because he'd used a university computer to download certain pictures from the web and public official Y was fired because he visited a particular web site on company time and how any employee at some companies who so much as sends a personal email from work is automatically terminated....
thoughts of how the US government and its foreign allies have this Echelon project going on which uses all sorts of hi-tech equipment posted around the world and above it to suck up every bit of data it can find and then searches it for... whatever they want about whoever they want... using powerful artificial intelligence programs....
thoughts of how kids are being expelled from schools now for coming to class with a nail clipper in their pocket or a Tylenol in their back pack....
thoughts of how simply arranging the 26 letters of the alphabet in a certain way can result in one's being locked up in a nasty place for a very, very long time....
thoughts of how the US will soon have more people behind bars per capita than Russia or Iran or Iraq or South Africa or any other country in the world....
thoughts of how the US is executing people at an ever faster rate even as virtually every other country in the developed world has now banned the death penalty....
thoughts of how Russia no longer executes anyone at all even as the US moves to execute the mentally retarded and children....
thoughts of how Illinois recently found out that many people on its death row were being exonerated by new evidence....
thought of how Al Gore said in a recent interview that of course capital punishment was going to lead to the execution of innocent people and we were just gonna have to accept that fact and move on....
yes, as i lay in bed this morning, i thought of many things. things that had slowly been accumulating in my head for months and years as i read the newspaper and the news magazines and watched the evening news but which, for some reason, my mind suddenly decided to play connect-the-dots with only a few hours ago as i slumbered in the night....
and when i shook the last vestiges of sleep from my head and got up and started to go about my day, i thought
"hey, i'm not a right wing nut who hears black UN helicopters in the night sky or thinks the raid in waco was unjustified or is sure They are out to get me. i don't believe anyone but lee harvey shot kennedy, and i think the world would be a better place had mcveigh and the unabomber never been born, and i've laughed at the idea that the CIA developed AIDS to rid the planet of black people, and i happen to believe taxes are too low and that the government isn't intrusive enough.... i mean, look at the whole 'food supplement industry' and how it's exempt from the laws regarding safety and purity so that we can't even be sure that a bottle at the drug store labeled 'ginkgo biloba' actually contains either ginkgo or biloba....
...so what's up with me??"
and then i remembered salmon rushdie
and the women in the Taliban's afghanistan
and i remembered William Sawtry, too....
it was England, 1401, and Sawtry was a priest accused of believing that the consecrated host possessed a material residue. for holding this dangerous view he was burned at the stake by the royal order of King Henry IV, who simply couldn't wait the few weeks it would take Parliament to pass its "On the necessity of burning heretics" statute....
and then i remembered how, a year later, John Sparrowhawk lost his head for saying that Henry was really the son of a Ghent butcher - and responsible for the bad weather, to boot....
as i've mentioned at least once before, i used to watch the original "Twilight Zone" series.
one of my favorite episodes was called "The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street"....
in it, a small, Andy Hardy kind of town is seized by the belief that an alien invasion is imminent.
convinced that the town is harboring alien sympathizers - maybe even aliens in disguise - the townspeople turn on one another. first the oddest among them were attacked, of course, but in the end no one was safe....
from a distant hilltop, two aliens watched. "amazing creatures, these earthlings.... all we have to do is flash a few lights in the sky and they do all the dirty work for us.... in town... after town... after town...."
remembering that episode tonight, i'm starting to understand why i woke up so afraid this morning...
the question becomes why the hell is everyone else?