Reflections during a Night in Jail
Dec. 2005

I need to be gentle with myself right now and rely on a mystique that has patience-impatience built into it around the enormous amount of work ahead. It’s a challenge for me not to become overwhelmed.

Yesterday morning I picked up a Nation magazine dealing with torture. Read a couple of articles and had to put it down. It was something that I would never want to do, run from dealing with the ugly face of US policy that leads to human violation in its most obscene ways and now that policy is institutionalized. Yet, I did. I put the article down: was it passion fatigue? Was it the result of a jail experience that I had recently? Was the experience more difficult than I want to admit? Was it that I’d seen too much in Chiapas, Mexico in a shelter where I saw legless and armless human beings who fell off of trains, pushed off of trains trying to catch one of them to al norte? Do I need to hide? Do I need go on a long retreat?

I’ve always believed in the urgency to look injustice in the face, take on the rot of the system that leads to torture and war making. Our government is spending 25 million on research to improve nuclear weapons so that they’re applicable to a 21st century reality; a move beyond the Cold-War setting out of which they came. This violence rarely makes the news, but it’s part of what has become known as protecting Democracy — Democracy Creation; it’s part of the Pentagon largess in dolling out $9 billion in defense contracts all, of which are doomed to failure.

And there are other connections; they’re meshed with stress. The Federal Reserve raises interest rates and when it does, suicides rebound like the market and begin to soar; incarcerations swell, heart attacks increase, suicides and the largest mental institution in the US, the LA Jail swells. Then we have bigger walls along the border unable to contain nearly a million human beings who cross each year. To top it off, a whopping defense budget now passes the $500-billion mark, making the US the prime consumer and merchant of death on the planet.

I’m writing on multiple fronts. Most recently trying to put together some reflections on jail-time that I did with 19 others here in Bangor as we tried to talk with Senator Snow about Iraq; about being lied to; about bloodletting with no end in sight in Iraq; about declaring an end to war and withdrawing US troops — NOW; about our senior Senator admitting George Bush lied to her. The response: we got arrested.

So I’m trying to process that experience.

Spiritual electricity generated by solidarity grids located in the hearts of human beings ran in high gear throughout the day. And the energy was free, without any of the trappings of Enron or the market. The grid: the human spirit pumping; making connections with one another; hearing a bell toll for over 100,000 Iraqis killed, challenging a 30,000 statistic-lie of the Administration and for thousands of US troops killed in and outside the theatre of war, dying due to a war based on lies, oil, water and empire.

An electricity in my own body lit imagination and pathways to citizenship that go with a jail connection. Truth speaks about an occupation based on lies and proclaimed as gospel.

With ears attentive to a 20-minute press conference, one avoided by the press, I listened to an analysis of the times we live in that had riveting-power behind it. I witnessed a sense of language that did me good, linked me tightly to a world with consequences behind it, a world with complicity implications, a politics as well; and not least of all a spirituality and economic view ripe for creating something other than that which focuses on destruction.

Those who spoke shared words full of the stuff that the body never forgets. How could it when we were addressed with respect and dignity, as adults living at a time of a skyrocketing defense budget; a world where a demolished caring sector made more vulnerable the weakest in our society premised on property rather than on life and caring.

There was no hiding, no cowering, no amnesia, no accepting lies about body counts that confused and obscured an obscene war, as though war could be considered otherwise.

The Press Conference was a spiritual experience. It was a moment of glad tidings. It proclaimed resistance. Each morsel of data, politics and spirituality shared, brought me back to an America where fellow citizens stood tall in times of pestilence. Later in the corridor in front of Senator Snow’s office, we sang, strategized as to how sisters and brothers move beyond self-imposed walls and thrive together in the public domain pummeled by state power committed to market principles of isolation and adulating a life of consumption and love of ego. And we stood in that public realm and declared a “no” which meant a “yes” to the kind of nation we hope to see fall into the laps of future generations, one that would be a beacon of solidarity and hope to the poor of our own society and to the world’s poor as well — rather than a predator nation.

My peers were tutoring me. My community taking the time to craft hard and difficult questions for me: never mind Senator Snow. I appreciated the painstaking work presenters did to illustrate the signs of the times: war, growing military budget, breath-taking deficit, national rumblings about institutionalized lies and ground-swelling demands to end the war, bring the troops home. Presenters shared data, emotions and spirituality in a way that fed me, allowed me to stand a bit taller and say to myself this is one of the finest demonstrations that I’ve ever attended: an experience I’ll never forget, now etched into who I am.

The data came at me like bullets.

• Billions on war.
• An alarming deficit.
• Widespread poverty.
• Bangor comes up with at least $13 million a year for war.

Facts unfurled about the US, facts not totally unfamiliar to me. What was new was the context: THIS GATHERING, this day, thousands of days into the Bush Administration, into the 21st Century! (On another part of the planet a movement speaks about Socialism for the 21st Century, and on this day in Hong Kong folks from around the world challenge systemic machinery at work in the WTO, intent on pulverizing most of humanity; in Bolivia there’s a chance that Evo Morales, who connects with his people rather than people from away who control the country’s resources, stands an excellent chance of winning their presidential election.)

The Press Conference was a wake up cry. The info crawled into my flesh, pushing, heaving: a moral Kristina demanding response. I thought of Tony Morrison in what she taught me in her “Beloved”: listen to the spirits. And throughout the day they challenged me: Jesus, Mother Jones, Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King and Romero, Santo de las Americas. Others who make up my biography did their work as well the folks who took me into their trust in geographical spaces on the periphery of empire: Mexico, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Argentina, Venezuela, along the US-Mexican border – the Mexico-Guatemalan border and then Iraq. And my friends at the gathering who confirmed the importance of a community nourished by a commitment to take one step at a time to challenge things as they are.

I thought of an Iraqi dentist whom I met in Baghdad who cleaned by teeth and he did it free. He made it clear to me to be a Muslim means to live a life of generosity. I thought of the undocumented people who fed me as I slept in the streets of Arriaga, Mexico. Those living in these myriad hot-spots transformed my life and now they demand solidarity gestures appropriate to the times outlined at a press conference held more than a thousand days into a declared war on all of humanity. I wasn’t alone. I celebrated that. And knew that alone the future looked bleak and it’s that aloneness the market lauds.

I remembered some of the prep work I witnessed. Together with others at the P&J Center, respect, love and caring exuded as outlines of the day unfolded and changed with interventions by those in a circle without hierarchy. Women and men spoke in voices with power behind them; their eyes connected with one another, the energy surge in the room was powerful. A 21st century town meeting. Yes, that’s what I saw it as: a bit of the future happening by the way we looked, listened and respected one another as interventions surfaced.

As a community we moved into a public space we created in front of Senator Snow’s office: a space, free, without price; without having to go into debt to use; and there I witnessed a university in the making, linked to a simple truth: people power, sovereignty based on the spirit of a people beholding not to markets and those who control them; but to truth. I heard language-creation worthy of the great struggles that stood with the oppressed rather a propertied class.

Sitting in the corridor, in front of Snow’s office, the implications of the Press Conference began to unravel. Here I was in a classroom that I’d yearned for most of my adult life. In the previous century I had my taste of it: hearing Dr. King declare in D.C.: “I have a dream…I’ve reached the mountain top.” It was my first exposure to the classroom of the world, and decades later in my hometown, in Bangor, Maine, I find it again, an experience of joy seeing friends, the warmth of hugs, encouragement to stay the course, a sense of the species evident in the eyes, the comments, the songs and energy shared. Sister-Brother became power words with emotional, psychic and spiritual-drive behind them that market reforms attempt to rob and starve off. And here the market failed and the billions of dollars that go in to it to clutter air-waves advertising to keep us from thinking about others.

The police came to remove us. With my hands behind my back I let an officer put handcuffs on me. He put them on so tight I screamed, for almost immediately I could feel the circulation in my hands coming to a close. Blood circulation in my hands stopped: painful. Later I though that as I screamed it must have meshed with the screams of those hidden in clandestine jails that dot Europe and the Middle East and Guantanamo where torture takes place. I thought of torture as public policy in these hidden from public-eye-places. Torture in US prisons.

Let me say the whole day, the night in jail, and the lock-up-experience with fifteen people waiting to see a judge as to whether they could get bail they could afford gave me a peek into part of the US I’m unfamiliar with in the 21 century: it wasn’t a pretty sight. The learning experience that came from listening to conversations with the victims of society, some of the millions of human beings in the juridical machinery of this country eating them up and who perhaps will never break out of it was intense. I just listened. I heard that one man sold drugs, pills and when he sold them it created a world of intense cognitive dissidence for him because he knew that some people could die from taking them.

During the process period going into the jail after 19 of us were arrested in the corridor in front of Senator Snow’s office a guard in charge came over to the person dealing with me and in a hushed voice said “Don’t let him out until he shows identification.” When I asked the person dealing with me what the person said he showed what he wrote down, and when I saw it I said: “Well, there is no point in filling out the forms if I’m not going to get out.” After that I was separated from the others that I went to jail with and isolated in a small cell.

In the cell I tried to do some yoga. I tried to focus; tried to be open to energy and it’s here where I face a new challenge, to touch common energy, link to the universe, to sisters and brothers around this planet riveted to a dream that new things are possible even though the odds seem overwhelmingly against it happening. I even went so far as to imagine sand in Iraq filled with depleted uranium and tried to see it as part of the democratic process, give it voice and wondered what it would say if allowed to speak to representatives who favor war. I thought of the sand in the tough place it’s put in where it downs children who play in it; kids that I saw in a cancer ward dying because a nation-state that claims ultimate imperial power on the planet uses a weapon that makes everything radio active after it’s used as a weapon of choice to take out tanks.

Leonardo Boff, a liberation theologian introduced me to this challenge. When I take it on it opens up a world of prolific energy the market can’t provide, and a gives me a look at a Christianity used by the powerful in support of war and violation, a Christianity they squirrel away from; terrified at what Boff proposes as a requirement of our times.

So I tried, in a small cell — so small I couldn’t stretch out fully so I knelt in a prayerful position rather than sit on one of two chairs pegged to the floor. A guard opens the door and tells me that I have to get off the floor because he can’t see me. I tell him that I’m on the floor because my back bothers me. He shuts the door.

Richard Stander, a friend, one of the 18 others arrested, comes over and looks in the window and asks: “Jim, how are you? We miss you. Wish you were with us in the group.” I begin to tell Richard why I was isolated. And it was hard being alone, not sharing with others what was going on with me; the power of the experience of taking in the world from a jail cell and not hearing resistance stories from the others.

When it dawned on me that I was “undocumented”, and it took a while for me to become aware of the consequence of the off-hand remark made by the officer, then an entire world of solidarity with the folks that came into my life in October-November that I met along the US-Mexican border and Mexican-Guatemalan border gushed forward. It was nourishment. It was healing, expansive energy hurling me into relationship with others. Now I was one of them. It was good. My body immediately felt the surge of energy that no Enron could provide. I didn’t feel alone. I was in a better place to understand and feel the pain of those “arrancados”- uprooted, a word that a priest, Fr. Cayetano, introduced me to. I met him in Mexico. He used it when he talked about violent implications behind a globalization process that has forgotten the human pulse and forces human beings to flee from their homes, without papers, undocumented, “illegal aliens” on this planet of ours.

How do I even begin to talk about it without talking about Iraq, without noting a scandalous, mounting defense budget, and at the same time, noting that US military people are in New Mexico working to capture the undocumented in their efforts to border cross an area under a state of emergency? How do I even begin to talk about it when a movement is afloat to eventually have military personnel doing police work in this country?

I felt that my prayer was all about trying to make connections with lies, deception, torture chambers dotted throughout Europe and decades of torture-history connected with US foreign policy. Vietnam and Central America brought that home for so many of us.

But in a jail cell I’m striped of everything. Wearing prison-orange. No desk. No computer. No Financial Times of London. No access to the world. No idea of time with a light constantly on 24x7, the only change when it dims at night and brightens when a new prison day begins. All I have is a hopper, a bed bolted to the floor, a mattress, two blankets, one that I’m sitting on and the other around me to ward off a chill, and lastly, Jim Harney with a challenge to move beyond the walls, be attentive, listen to the soul pumping, hear the voices of past and present, of those who have come into my life and reminded me throughout the years as good friends that the only course is a way that leads to resistance.

Trying to move beyond the walls and imagining doing it with 20 friends sitting beside me who perished in El Salvador, working for a kind of society that the United States of America feels jeopardizes its interests: a just society, a socialist world that today people would articulate as a world where everyone has a place. I could feel their body warmth, their encouraging words that kept on coming back to a refrain that once pushed their lives to face the unthinkable: you’re not alone; we’re with you.

Yes, they’re the “presentes” with me, some of the thousands of those who had died during decades of resistance and struggle in Latin America to build a world that is free of control of the great colossus to the north. With this nourishment I could cross the walls, drink from the wells of resistance that truly make this country what it is, folks who believed that the US could be something other than what it is where freedom, peace and justice would fly high and wouldn’t have to bow it’s head in shame because of present policies humanity deplores and because of that has become the principle enemy. And in doing that muster a commitment to go without water or food during my jail experience in solidarity with a friend, Frieda Berrigan, and others with her who managed to get to Guantanamo and fast; be in solidarity with those who know the world of torture first hand.

A swath of images hit me: Abu Grhaib, the mountain of naked bodies, prisoners nude lead like dogs on leashes; standing with Jennifer Harbury sitting in a plaza in Guatemala City with Guatemalans who know first-hand decades of US-backed violence gathered around her supporting her in her battle with the CIA that she eventually forced to admit murdered her husband; US tiger-cages in Vietnam; then running, dodging bombs in El Salvador; listening to a Honduran last month who told me about survival and having to deal with 19 of his friends who died on the way to al norte; Romero shaking my hand back in 1979 at Puebla, Mexico; and the priest, Fr. Cayetano, whom I met in Mexico telling me about his utopia in regards to immigrants: a world where people could farm their land and not be uprooted, live in dignity; running at Bishop Romero’s funeral…endless images and faces.

In a jail cell I pray with my biography in mind.

It’s the most frenetic time of the year: I’m alone. All I have are decades of history behind me, a community behind me that leads me to parts of the empire where the most outrageous violence takes place in the name of democracy and freedom.

I’m in jail in Bangor, Maine. This state attracts tourists from all over the world, yet on an average per capita basis Maine incarcerates more people than other state in the nation.

I’m still dealing with the trip I just made along the border; flashbacks to conversations; flashbacks to faces; flashbacks to train tracks in Arriaga, Mexico, where the undocumented catch freight trains to al norte, and all the feelings that trains bring–chills encompass my body when I hear an engine whistle blow. The whistle of a “monstro de hierro” – the iron monster, as one Salvadoran put to me in a brief moment of testimony that he shared while waiting to jump a train in Mexico after having walked six days to get there. This eats away at me because people lose their lives on trains because they can’t stay awake and fall off.

But I’m also pondering what some of the guards said who spoke to me; cared about me. Two encounters:

One man approaches me and asks me why I didn’t bale out? Why did I stay the night in jail. He made it clear that he wasn’t trying to make a statement supporting what I did; he just wanted to know why I’d spend the night in jail when I could have left. I told the man that I appreciated the question and for giving me the opportunity to clarify my own decision not to accept bail.

I told him that I believed in what Gandhi called “truth force” and his noncooperation with evil. That’s what I was trying to do; not cooperate with the war as best I could, knowing full well that there were times when I remained silent. A flashback to the Press Conference on the complicity theme. I have to own up on that.

I told the man that I didn’t want to pay bail because I didn’t want to cooperate with the system; I wanted to go before a judge, plead innocent and be released under my own recognizance.

The man appreciated the remarks and that I could make a stand. He lauded me for that. He believed that in most of society people don't make stands. He even included himself. He worked at the prison to provide security for his family. At times he saw things that demanded that he say something and he didn't. He put his hands up to his lips as though sealing them. He told me how conflictive it was for him. The man cared. I wanted to give him a hug. Tell him that I was with him. Bonding happened; I could feel his spirit and I think that he felt some of mine just by the way we looked at each other.

Later, after a judge gave me a trial date for January 11 and let me go on my own recognizance, I’m taken out of the court room in my shackles where a guard takes them off and puts handcuffs on me. They are attached to another man who can’t leave jail because bail was prohibitive for him. We start to walk toward the jail and the guard tells me that there are press people outside. I ask who they are waiting for: he says that they’re waiting for you. Then he tells me what’s going to happen: I can’t stop, just keep to myself and keep walking. The man could have said nothing and his comment gave me thirty-seconds to think of a sound bite.

A channel 7 reporter who was with us at Snow’s office is there with a camera person. She asks, “And so now what do you think?”

I said to her, “At this point in time perhaps citizenship means some jail-time attached to it. The time in jail was a spiritual experience. Hopefully some of the energy of that experience will touch Senator Snow and she’ll change her mind about Iraq.”