“In a clearing stands a boxer
A fighter by his tradeAnd he carries the reminders
Of every blow that layed him down
Or cut him til he cried out
In his anger and his shame
I am leaving, I am leaving
But the fighter still remained…”
Three nights ago EL, a young college student, was called to
the watch commander’s office at 1:00 am.
The Captain on duty informed him his mother had died suddenly and
unexpectedly earlier that evening. He was
allowed to make a collect call to his sister and then requested that he be
placed in the hole for a few hours – to grieve – because you don’t cry in
prison around other inmates. He returned
later in the day to attend class. He’s not
allowed to attend the funeral.
“Li la LiLi La Li Li Li La Li”
What makes us keep trying, keep hoping, keep believing when
the rational part of our mind, when everyone around us tells us it’s
hopeless? I think often about Dr. Viktor
Frankl’s thoughts in “Man’s Search for Meaning”. There he was confided to a concentration
camp, being starved, witnessing the worst in humanity because he “broke the law”
(we forget, yet Dr. King pointed it out in his letter from the Birmingham Jail,
the actions of the Nazis were carried out according to properly passed
laws). He was sustained by the memories
of his wife and their life together. He would
not learn until after the war that his wife had been executed early after their
arrest and separation.
I live amongst criminals.
With few exceptions, (Big S being the only guy who is factually
innocent) the vast majority of men here broke the law. But, for an equally vast number, the
punishment bears no relationship to the crime.
Yet for the vast majority of these men, they remain hopeful. They believe something better will come to
them.
The writer H. Jackson Browne, Jr. wrote: “Never deprive someone of hope; it might be
all they have.”
When Paul Simon performed his song, New York City and the country
were still in a state of shock. Where
once stood the trade centers, there was a ten story pile of smoldering
rubble. The death toll was still not
calculated “but the fighter still remained”.
I love that line. I
love the image it creates. Everyone one
of us bears scars of hurt and shame. We all
feel pain. We all suffer loss. At times, we all want to give up and
quit. But, like Simon’s boxer, we stand
back up battered and bruised and vow to fight on.
This blog isn’t about anything in particular that occurred. It may have come about over the past few
weeks as a group of students I hadn’t worked with before started coming to me
for help. As I worked with these guys
invariably one of them would ask “Is it true you haven’t heard from your kids?”
or “Your wife divorced you?” or “You really got fifteen years for embezzlement?” Maybe it was the two officers last weekend
reminding me how many lies were printed about me in the paper after my arrest
and then officer H saying “you’re a decent guy; you deserved better”.
I asked DC, a great boxer in his teens, if he was ever put
on the canvas.
“Yeah”, he said. “Guy beat me
senseless and I hit the deck.”“What’d you do?” I asked.
“Got up. Can’t stay down. No matter how bad it hurt, I couldn’t let ‘em beat me.”
Couldn’t let ‘em beat me.
The fighter still remained…
POSTSCRIPT: In an
ironic twist, USA Today columnist Craig Wilson wrote a piece two days after I penned
this on the same topic. Aptly titled “You
can’t turn back now…” it included the following lines from poet Annie Johnson
Flint:
“Have you come to the Red Sea place in your life.
Where, in spite of all you can do,There is no way out, there is no way back.
There is no other way but through?”
Wilson then concludes:
“Getting down that path isn’t always easy. We stumble.
We fall. But we get up and march
on.”
Amen to that.
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