Judith Armatta

Judith Armatta is a lawyer, journalist and human rights activist

THE NEW NORMAL: A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A SOMETIME WRITER

Because you are a writer, you get out of bed, pee, start the coffee, and head directly to your office computer. No teeth brushing. No getting dressed (writers can stay in their p.j.s all day). This is because you aren’t disciplined enough to eat breakfast and read the paper in less than three hours and you really do want to get that book finished and another dozen queries sent.

Over time, because you are not a disciplined person, your email sneaks into first place, followed by BING, because it has beautiful photographs – and news items. After an hour or more, you get to your writing, but soon it is time for breakfast and the New York Times, which takes up another hour and a half. You do not read it on line. The pop up dancing ads in the middle of an article drive you mad so you cling to your hard copy, i.e. the REAL New York Times, which sometimes lands in the bushes in your yard providing the opportunity for an early morning hunt, followed by drying the paper over the heat vents. By this time it is noon and your writing sits there like a poor neglected cousin. And it is soon time for your regular coffee date with an old friend, your counseling appointment, a board meeting, or your writing group (ha ha ha!).

On another normal day in the technologically dominated 21st Century, you open your computer and begin to print out a contract, but nothing happens. You change ink cartridges. Still nothing. You turn the printer off and back on. Still nothing. You call for technical support. After taking over your computer, the young man with a lovely Indian accent tells you your computer has been hacked by someone in Germany. 98% of your files have been corrupted. He fixes the problem. Several hours have passed. It will cost you $349.99 for protection. You cancel your current anti-virus contract because it failed to protect you against hacking.

You sit down to pay bills and find a charge for $198.48 from “Webnetworksolutions” that you’ve never heard of. When you call them, a woman in Florida asks what your account number is with Frontier. You say “I’ve never heard of Frontier.” She asks what is your phone company. You answer, flustered (it is still early), “I don’t remember but it’s not Frontier.” You tell her there is a charge on your visa bill for $198.48 giving their phone number and you did not agree to any service, whatever that service might be. You can’t understand her answer (you often cannot understand people speaking from your cell phone and long for the old land line—some technology improvements need improvement). You repeat that the charge is wrong and you have no account with Frontier. She tells you to call your Visa –or, at least, that’s what you think she says. When you call Visa to dispute the charge, the woman can’t find your Visa account, but eventually does. You say you don’t know anything about this company. She checks something, then says they are going to remove the charge. They consider it fraud. In one or two days they will send you a new Visa card with an entirely new account number. Then, you will have to notify every organization that automatically charges to your card each month. There are 11 of them. Notifying them will be your task for another morning – before writing.

You responded to a special deal to get DirecTV streaming for $10 a month for the first three months and $35 monthly thereafter. When a better offer appears in your inbox, you contact DirecTV and change contracts. They bill you for both. You call to ask why they have not canceled the first contract. After an hour and a half on the phone, they tell you they have resolved the matter. They haven’t. Next day, you spend another hour and a half on the phone with another person forced to do this work for lack of better options. The problem is not his fault. He sincerely wants to help you – and after 90 minutes he supposedly has corrected the problem. When you try to watch DirecTV, however, the screen flashes a message that you are unsubscribed. You contact DirecTV again. After a 90 minute on-line chat, during which you run numerous times between the TV in the living room and the computer in your office and repeatedly ask him to explain what he is talking about (you are computer-age illiterate), the technician tells you to call Amazon Fire and hangs up. The woman at Amazon Fire fixes the problem in less than 5 minutes.

Now you have time to drive 45 minutes to the doctor’s to figure out why you can’t breath and why you have a pulsing headache (brain tumor? aneurism?). They don’t know. You huff and puff to your chair, pop two Tylenol, and stick an ice pack on your head, while you read about the fall of U.S. civilization and the coming Fascism. Thus, ends a new normal day in the life of a sometime writer in the 21st Century.

 

SLEEPING THE SLEEP OF THE JUST

FROM A WORK IN PROGRESS

[Following revocation of probation for smoking pot and missing a meeting, the judge reminds my grandnephew (who I call Daniel here) that he told him he had to be perfect, something not possible for a 20 year old with mental health issues). After the judge ordered my nephew to prison, his grandmother spoke up, “The system didn’t have to be perfect.” The judge warned her not to talk. When she asked if she could hug her grandson who was in tears before they took him away, the judge told her to shut up or he’d send her to jail!” And so dies faith in justice and the rule of law not only for the convicted, but for family as well.]

Did the judge really think prison would make him better? His attorney had implied as much when she was unable to find a treatment program in the community and naively suggested a stay in prison would provide one. Or was the judge merely punishing Daniel for not being perfect? Sending this young man to the dangers and harsh conditions of prison to live in a milieu of hardened offenders would not make him a better person. He would be lucky just to survive.

*    *     *

Three a.m. Flipping like a hooked fish on a river bank, over and over, from my right side to my left, and onto my back, beginning the sequence again and again. My restless brain refuses to imagine lying on soft meadow grass, watching clouds move among a cathedral of fir branches, listening to the chirps and trills of birdsong. My attempt at meditation rouses images of a small, tight space with glaring light, gray cement walls, a door that can keep out hurricanes and keep a young man in, steel bars, the headache-inducing sound of metal slamming metal, a cacophony of unquiet voices, a hard bed with a meager blanket, a metal toilet with no seat, tough, tattooed prisoners with muscles bulging.

Daniel is in segregation, locked in an 8 by 10 foot cell 23 hours of every 24. He cannot make or receive phone calls. We are dependent on the prison staff to know if he is alright. For a while they answered my phone calls, said they checked on him, reassured me. No longer. I call and leave messages, asking about his meds, his health, his state of mind. I tell them he sent a letter. He is afraid of what will happen when he is released into the general population. He is a sex offender. His victim was a “child.” Nevermind that the sex was consensual and she lied about her age. He is called a “chimo” and a “rapo.” They will beat him up, he writes. Sex offenders get raped in prison.

            I want to have a conversation with the judge who so casually revoked Daniel’s probation, as if he were signing a permission slip to leave school early. The judge (a former prosecutor), a current prosecutor, and the probation officer were of one mind. This kid was uppity and needed to be taught a lesson.

            I want to wake this judge and ask how he can treat people that way. I want him to feel the pain he has caused, not just to my grandnephew but to his grandmother, his mother, his father, his grandfather, his aunts, his sisters, his girlfriend, his son. I now understand “gut wrenching.” I want this judge to see into the future like I do every night. A young man whose life is ruined. He has no prospects. It will be a miracle if he finds even the lowest paid, unskilled job when he gets out. He will not be able to support his son. Will he even find a place to live? Since felons are denied public benefits, he will have to beg or eat in soup kitchens. And how will he get the medication and the treatment he needs? He will not. The prison door will revolve as the judge revokes his parole again and again.

            The judge is elected by the people. Is that what makes him tough on crime? To them, my grandnephew is a criminal, a felon of the worst kind: a sex offender, “one of the most despised groups of people in American society—along with terrorists and perpetrators of genocide.”[i] . . . .

            It’s now nearly 5 a.m. Abby will wake soon. Maybe then I will sleep. I wonder what Daniel is doing now. It’s the middle of the night in Oregon. I hope he is not having a restless night. It can signal a manic episode and then he’ll end up in the hole again. And the judge? Sleeping peacefully? No second thoughts about the young man he so cavalierly sent to prison for a year? Sleeping the sleep of the just.

 

 

[i]Lisa Anne & Laura J. Zilney, Reconsidering Sex Crimes and Offenders: Prosecution or Persecution? Santa Barbara, Denver,  Oxford: Praeger (2009) p.xiii.