PRISONER EXPRESS

'Neighbors' and 'neighborly' didn't seem like terms that captured the feeling of the environment. Why not? Because I had absorbed the ambient "keep a closed door, be rude to the world, assume everyone is hostile" philosophy. And there was a price I paid for acting un-neighborly. I felt like I was cut off from the Technicolor real world, trapped and surrounded in a surreal black and white world full of combatants.

Then a miracle happened. In this cruel bizarre world, I ran into another stranded soul who had been a friend in my youth. His family had actually lived next door to mine and I played with his older brother who was my age. When I saw him in jail, I assumed the posture of a surrogate big brother. I thought I had to teach him how to survive physically by teaching him what physical postured he must take around other prisoners, but the amazing thing is that he had more to teach me. I want to tell you about him, because he had the courage to demonstrate neighborliness for me and that is the type of courage we should all have.

At first, I was afraid he would get himself hurt. He treated the men of other races like humans and said things like "good morning, neighbor." He even smiled at people. Sometimes I was embarrassed to be around him, but I bore with his eccentricities because he reminded me of family and I was extremely lonely. That attachment allowed him to teach me some things. He proved to me that he could be moral in prison. He lived by faith on moral principles instead of jailhouse tradition. That is a radical concept in an atmosphere that is dominated by fear and peer pressure. His bravery allowed me to see a contrast to the rest of the prison and remember when I was in his position.

As I looked at those who wanted my friend to frown and conform to the tough-guy postures, I remembered those who had approached me with their 'helpful' advice when I was new to jail. As a third party to this recurring interchange, I was able to discern more of what was happening. On some level, the older convicts hated my friend for reminding them of what they had lost. They had lost the ability to genuinely smile and be happy. They told him to stop being so open or he would get hurt by his own hope. They told him to bury his personality and joy from view. They told him to conceal and hoard his joy to himself.

But then I noticed how miserable and lonely these though guys actually were. They had forgotten how to live and surrendered their motivation for swimming upstream against the prison's life robbing currents. It was easier for them to surrender their creativity and float along with the trends and life-robbing currents. I was lonely because I had listened to those so-called authorities. They had buried their joy so well that it now was permanently lost. They were disconnected from their job, familial self, their neighbors and most of the human experience. And I was in danger of becoming more like them, until my friend came back into my life to give me a behavior to contrast.

My friend was keenly aware of the reality of the interconnections between all men that are in the same environment. He didn't know a lot of big words to describe it, but he knew that whatever judgments he made about his neighbors (the men in his circumstance) would inevitable affect how he valued his own life too. My friend knew the differences between ideal and practicalities, but he also knew that social ideals are worth struggling for. Actually, we don't have a choice. Humans are social creatures. Neighborly behaviors conduct to our emotional development. When we give up on having neighbors and acknowledging out neighbors, then we subtly become complicit with the system that dehumanizes them and us.