Transcript
July 11, 2019 Repression = Prisoners and Feminists Prisons function as tools of social control. In fact, prisoners today are historically oppressed for their writing and they are intentionally kept in a perpetual state of destabilization through harsh censorship policies, disorganization, and distraction in order to make it harder for them to effectively organize against a status quo that oppress them. In fact, mass incarceration is a machine being used to exterminate, as imperialists see us, the undesirable sub-underclass. The same holds true for feminists who are trying to effectively and historically organize against the same imperialist status quo who have created this gender war between the sexes that is affecting the lives of millions of people across the U.S. For instance, I am one of those men affected and unafraid to speak out against this gender war that has encouraged mostly Democratic politicians to create tough on crime laws that make it easier for despotic prosecutors to convict men of sexual and other criminal offenses to fuel mass incarceration. I am a North Carolina prisoner serving 146 years for allegedly raping a female twenty four years ago in 1997 that had long since been thrown out of court by a grand jury in 1998. These charges weren’t resurrected until I reported police corruption in the Cherryville Police Department to FBI, and of which later resulted in light prison sentences of high ranking city officials and police in 2012. There was no DNA, biological physical or even credible evidence to support my conviction and these charges arose during the first wave of the “Me Too” movement and ironically, it was a female who prosecuted me. There are women out there who are simply just angry at men in general and who just want to point fingers as a result of plain cheating, lying men like I once was without realizing the cold harsh consequences of their actions. Sex offenders, innocent or not, are being brutalized, raped, robbed, terrorized, victimized, and beaten daily by prisoners and fascists and are being sentenced from decades to death by incarceration on top of facing societal lifetime ridicule as the result of sex offender registries that force men to live and hide in shame and in the shadows like biblical lepers marked and cursed. What’s more shocking to a clear honest conscience is the fact that government through science, can recycle the most deadliest bio-hazard even nuclear energy, yet they won’t even attempt to effectively recycle a human being! Don’t get me wrong, I’m neither condoning nor advocating for anyone who commits such a crime. I’m stating facts from personal experience and long suffering. The “Me Too” movement has done a lot of fantastic things to liberate and bring like minded women's struggles to the center stage to build on women's rights. But at the same time it has destroyed a lot of innocent men’s lives through wrongful convictions. I personally believe rape is wrong and that no means no! On the other side of the coin, women should have a freedom in their own bodies and should be allowed to have abortions and especially under certain circumstances such as rape victims, underage pregnancies, incest, family planning, and pregnancies that have a high expectancy rate of causing injury to the female or unborn child. As to the gender war? Attacks on women’s rights isn’t anything new in American history. Indeed, it’s a recurring phenomenon, it returns every time women begin to make some headway toward equality, a seemingly inevitable early frost to the culture’s brief flowering of feminism. I have looked at women’s struggles through research and many angles to compare it with my own struggle to prove I’m innocent as to why I’m presently in prison. The harder I try to grasp my freedom, due process of law, and to study social justice, the more repression and time I’m being forced to spend in solitary confinement. Likewise, and through a historical lens, American women are trapped on this asymptotic spiral, turning and spinning endlessly through the generations drawing ever nearer to her destination without ever arriving. Each new revolution promises to be “the revolution” that will free her from suspended animation that will grant her, finally, a full measure of human justice and dignity. But each time the spiral turns her back just short of the finish line. As prisoners, we can relate to her struggles because we ourselves have fought for decades against a universe of racism, censorship, slave labor, long term solitary confinement, inhumane treatment, disease ridden environments, poor diets, air and water, and even today we fight through our “POW movement” (Prisoners Organizing Worldwide) for better wages, food, medical care, rehabilitation, education and restoration of our freedom through painful hunger strikes and work stoppages and just when we think we are at a point of obtaining “some measure” of human justice, we find ourselves bombarded with tear gas, beatings and new harsher prison policies drafted by corrections czars that permit us to be treated even worse than before. Repression equals prisoners and feminists. A close look into the history of feminism, then as now, late Victorian religions and political leaders who accused women who postponed child bearing of triggering a “race suicide” that endangered (white) America’s future. They were in the words of Theodore Roosevelt, “criminals against the race” and “objects of contemptuous abhorrence by healthy people.” Married women who demanded rights were charged, then, as now, with creating a “crisis of the family” the media and the church railed against feminists for fueling divorce rates, and state legislatures passed more than 100 restrictive divorce laws between 1889 and 1906. Back then, S.C. banned divorce outright, and a band of “purity” crusaders, like the contemporary new right brigade condemned contraception and abortion as “obscene” and sought to have it banned. By the late 1800’s they had succeeded. Congress outlawed the distribution of contraceptives and a majority of states criminalized abortion both for the first time in the nation’s history. By the 1910’s women's rights activists resurrected the struggle for suffrage and turned it into a nationwide political campaign. Even now in the 20th century, anyone with common sense can see how Donald Trump and Nancy Pelosi are using this gender war to fuel their own fan base and political campaigns. Meanwhile the rest of us are down here on ground zero getting our lives torn to pieces while they’re up there in Washington dog fighting back and forth soaking up the mainstream media attention that our collective struggles deserve as a smoke screen to keep our voices silenced. It’s disgusting! Nancy Pelosi brought in Christine Blasey Ford center stage to point fingers at then SCOTUS nominee Brett Kavanaugh knowing his position on Roe V. Wade, to accuse him of raping Ford some 35 years earlier with no proof in an attempt to destroy his career and life without any concern thereof, simply to push her own SCOTUS nominee forward without respect for law or anyone else’s rights. But the majority didn’t believe Ford, and pushed Kavanaugh through knowing his disagreement with Roe V. Wade so now we’re stuck. If we conducted a national poll, the majority of Americans support Roe V. Wade in every region of the country, in every age group, in both political parties and in the Catholic Church. The unwavering support for Roe only makes sense in the wider context of American History. The landmark ruling is simply a return to status quo. The right to an abortion practiced in one form or another since colonial times have never been restricted until the last half of the 19th century. And not until then did aborting a pregnancy before “quickening” (several months after conception) even assume a moral taint. In 1800, abortion was legal in every state and popular opinion on it largely neutral. It was only after the mid-century rise of the women’s rights movement that abortion became a battleground as women pressed for such simple family planning relief as “voluntary motherhood” which proposed that wives be free to refuse sex occasionally for health reasons. However, doctors, legislators, journalists and clergymen countered with a far more extreme campaign against all forms of birth control which is why we are where we are today with all these restrictions. If women want to have an abortion then they should be allowed to make that choice freely. It is for God our creator to pass judgement as to whether it’s right or wrong, not man, not woman, but our creator. Women should be as liberated as men and should have say so over her own body just as men. Likewise, and in the prison context, both men and women should be allowed to have control over their own bodies and against unwarranted and intrusive, exploitative bodily and cavity searches. The good news is that in the end, I believe women will prevail and I support feminists. I have learned a new respect for these revolutionary women and especially Muslim Women in Arab cultures and in the Middle East where they are forced to hide their beauty from the world and subjected to inhumane treatment by those horrible religious fanatical men. I’m a white man and “I see you,” and I pray you continue to fight tooth and nail for your rights, liberation and freedom. My tears struggle forward to meet you in my prayer for your freedom. I believe that if we bring all of our collective struggles to the streets for discussion, protest and nation, we can all win. But first we have to forget class, gender, race, cultural differences, and the transgressions of prisoners so that we can join forces on the battlefront of the political arena. Wars are historically won by perseverance and numbers. There are millions of men and women behind bars struggling and who are willing to support the feminist movement. The government has waged war against us all and now is the time for outside/inside organizers to join one another in solidarity to take our freedoms back and claim our God given rights to our own bodies and free will. No more tyranny!!! “We the people'' gave the government authority to rule over us and “we the people” have the ultimate power to remove that authority. Democracy means a form of government in which the sovereign power resides directly or indirectly through a system of representation. I believe we can change the world, one article, and one writer at a time. It was once said, “only social practice can be the criterion of truth… Marxist philosophy holds that the most important problem does not lie in understanding laws of the objective world and thus being able to explain it, but in applying the knowledge of these laws actively to change the world…” Mao Zedong Although I have become the agent of ridicule and tragedy, I believe in social justice and I refuse to let what one woman with a prison record in two states has cruelly done to me, turn me into something bitter. I’m a decent man with an unfortunate history and a big heart. I forgive her. Maybe one day she’ll read this and come forward. It is my hope that one day that men and women can see eye to eye and stop pointing fingers and hurting one another and start working on a solution so that we can all focus on building a safer and better world where there exists no racism, homophobia, antisemitism, anti-feminism, capitalism or totalitarian control over others or their bodies, a place where we can each find equality, peace, justice, harmony, unfaltering and life long love, happiness, prosperity and true meaning through complete freedom and liberation for all. William Frost once said, “The only way out is through…” I guess that means I have a long hard road ahead of me before ever finding Lady Justice… By: Randy A. Watterson [ID] 527 Commerce Dr. Elizabeth City, N.C. 27909
