TEAR DOWN THE WALLS

Trust me, I wish I could post happy stories here, but the world is just so screwed up...Stories of people like Deane Brown just below make me feel useless and ashamed to not be out in the street right now screaming instead of just typing at my computer.  The trouble is there are so many Deane Browns.  The amazing thing is there are also so many Deane Browns.  Those of us in the "free world" don't know how good we've got it.  Even the short time I spent in prison decades ago taught me lessons that I could have never learned anywhere else.  Although learning those lessons was damaging, there are times when I am thankful for the experience...an experience I wouldn't wish on anyone.  Behind the walls of the worlds prisons are some very bad people and a whole lot more folks no different than you or I.  When I left prison I promised myself I would never forget those I left behind.  I haven't and I won't.  I admit this "remembrance" doesn't do them a helluva a lot of good, not really.  It doesn't tear down the walls or melt the bars or create a world without solitary confinement, and all the rest.  It hasn't freed Leonard, it has not freed a couple of brothers just up in Omaha, it did nothing to save the life of Marilyn Buck.  I haven't really done much for all the nameless prisoners locked away.  I'm sorry. 

 Anyway...to paraphrase the words of one of the men who helped build the prison industrial complex, let us all pledge to "tear down that wall" that separates so many from so many.

                                  Marilyn Buck