17 December, 2007

• shopping’s done, oatmeal stout is good, work tomorrow… #
• i’m at corner bakery seeing where my ups package is! #
• one more hour of work…ah i’m wishing for the wkd again #

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eric volz’s conviction was overturned by the appellate court in Nicaragua

one more hour of work…ah i’m wishing for the wkd again

i’m at corner bakery seeing where my ups package is!

I have long since been a supporter of ending/abolishing the death penalty.   My support began as a young child while living in Texas.  Texas is the place where everything in me was born, including myself!  I was born in 1976, a time when racism was still a major issue, as it is now. 

I was born in East Texas [  Longview, Texas to be exact], a place where people of color were termed a derogatory name.  Myself, a mixed person of color [or colorless, as I often refer to myself], I found the racism and sexism to be quite problematic.  In fact, leaving St. Mary’s Catholic School, my mother asked: 

“Does anyone ever make fun of you because of your color?” 

I remember this day so clearly.  We were driving away from the school [a Catholic School which then was predominently white] in our brown Honda Hatchback [which, interestingly, they don't make anymore], and the conversation about color began.  This conversational event became for me the very event that I reference as when my consciousness was first  raised.  The rest is…a life that has been dedicated to fighting institutional injustices.

I mention this story because it is helpful to remember the epistemological ruptures that occur in one’s life.  The Alternet article that I have posted here presents a story concening a Texas minister, while ministering and providing pastoral care to death row inmates, is conversely seeking to oppose and eventually abolish the death penalty. 

I have great respect for folks who stand against cultural injustices and institutional injustices.  In this case, the context of Texas is a culture of death in so many ways:  the border, the policing system, the penitentiary system–I could go on.  But, his beginning in the prison system as a chaplain didn’t begin as one standing against the policing sytem and/or the death penalty.  The first to witness death by lethal injection and THE one who received the confessions, hopes and prayers of prisoners’ last minutes on planet earth, this Presbyterian brother is standing fast in an effort to abolish the death penalty in Texas.  Please give this article a read!

In an effort to democratize ideas and socialize knowledge, I offer you this very important article about the intersections of the cultures of religion and politics, and the intersections of the cultures of life and death.

By Michelle García, Amnesty International Magazine. Posted December 17, 2007.

Years of ministering to prisoners on death row turned Rev. Carroll Pickett into a passionate leader to end the death penalty.

The great Texas sun is rising on a cool summer morning as the Rev. Carroll Pickett, a minister who once ushered condemned men into the execution chamber and watched them die, speaks of redemption. His Sunday school students, middle-aged and elderly couples from a gated community just north of Houston, contemplate the message of repentance given by the former prison chaplain of Texas’ most notorious penitentiary, a prison whose name is synonymous with hard time: Huntsville. Read the rest of this entry »