Resilience. If there is one word that I’ve had used to describe my last decade of incarceration, it has been resilience. Yes, I’ve been resilient. Resilient, through an assault on my person by Virginia state agents on four separate occasions, and one of those being four separate attacks by one person while I sat in solitary confinement during the early days of this nightmare. Resilient is what I’ve been through; the witness deprivations inflicted upon myself and too many others by Virginia DOC [Virginia Department of Corrections] staff. Resilient through abandonment, by what was once a large circle of friends, so called, and through a barrage of people who have come to me offering help only to provide none, or who have requested my help and firsthand reports from me, but provided no assistance regarding my clearly desperate situation. Resilient, as I remind myself to be grateful for the small group of people who have come to my aid and who have stayed and they know exactly who they are and so do I.
Resilience is synonymous with endurance and perseverance. It is the thing that is probably more accurate a description of those being held captive by the Virginia Department of Corruption and prisons in general; a place now wholly devoid of any modicum of humanity. Likewise, it is that thing that keeps the citizens of Virginia from exercising its rights as a free people and eliminating the Virginia DOC; a thing which is the very definition of that threat to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, as detailed in our Declaration of Independency, and wherein paragraphs two and three quite explicitly describe the whys and wherefores of removing those institutions that serve to usurp those unalienable and guaranteed rights of the citizenry.
I’d like to believe that it is resilience that holds the citizens at bay, as opposed to the idea that the citizenry has simply never read beyond the opening lines of the very document that secured their rights to freedom, by any and all means necessary, and yes, that includes open armed rebellion against any form of oppressive authoritarianism. “Law and order” have become the very hammer and anvil of tyranny forging the chains of their captivity, both within the Virginia Department of Corrections and outside its walls countrywide, as we see play out on the news every day. Resilience in the face of a testing ground such as the VA DOC is exactly how the lines of tyrannical abuse is pushed now onto the average citizen, who is either too distracted or too apathetic to worry about how the Virginia DOC, and again, other prison systems, have become the model for the prison that is now their entire state, their neighborhood and even their own homes. How else do we explain how the President approves of telling a U.S. citizen exercising her rights to protest and be free of a standing army on the streets and in the same breath that same President threatens military actions against the government of a foreign nation who kills its protesting citizens. This makes no sense.
Resilience can be one of the very few reasons that the citizens of this state and the country entire would allow a level of hypocrisy that involves mass military goons killing citizens in good standing and the ongoing violations of constitutional and human rights perpetrated daily in institutions such as prisons nationwide, including Virginia. Certainly, history shows that rebellion has begun over much lesser usurpations of a people’s guaranteed rights, especially that guaranteed right to defend their very lives against such usurpations.
In the case of these protesters in Virginia and countrywide, I do believe that a point or two must be articulated. The first of these is a problematic point at best. Maybe they both are. On the one hand, the U.S. Constitution, ironically informed by the Virginia constitution, guarantees the right to protest government actions as a means to redress grievances. On the other hand, as we’ve seen, protesting does not now and has very rarely impacted a single thing in the past several decades, if not since the 60s, and even then, only marginally. This being the case, and it most certainly is, the most important point is less simple and is more ugly, best articulated in a question: Why do protesters continue to bring a knife to an obvious gun fight? More accurately, they don’t bring even a knife to a gun fight. There was a point where those fighting the revolution 250 years ago stopped marching in lines against the British Regulars because it was a sure way to get slaughtered.
Maybe, and it is merely an opinionated suggestion, but maybe you should consider stronger tactics. There are always those who will tell you that there is no room for political violence in our system. That is a lie, and it is almost always regurgitated by those who use violence in a downward direction to maintain the hierarchy, that is to say, and keep the lower caste in its place; and also, by those whose positions are maintained by those below them adhering to such foolish notions. The parasite class, elites if you’d like, depend upon this among other numerous illusions of lies. My name is David Annarelli. I’m contributing writer for the Prison Journalism Project, prisonjournalismproject.org.,davidannerelli.wordpress.com, you can find me on Minutes Before Six, Prison Writers and other places if you google me. Thank you very much.
These commentaries are recorded by Prison Radio.
