Some Lessons You're Not Taught in School

It’s fall, and students here are just finishing their first full week of school, thanks to a late Labor Day holiday, which coincided with Hurricane Irene’s campaign up the east coast and her cleanup. Since I was a young child, I have always been excited at this time of year, though now I find myself some years also getting a bit melancholy. I still keep occupied throughout the year learning as much as I can about contemporary issues and subjects I enjoy, such as the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and as I write this, I’m nearly finished with the third level of Rosetta Stone French (though I can’t imagine actually having a conversation in French about anything other than changing my dollars pour des euros), but sometimes I find myself thinking about a former high school classmate of mine, too.

Her name was Mary Lou Arruda, and she was a cheerleader at Bridgewater-Raynham Regional High School the year I transferred into it, 1978. It was our sophomore year, and I didn’t really know Mary Lou more than just to wave ‘hello’ to her in the hallway. My algebra teacher had asked me to tutor one of the jocks who was friends with her, and it was through him that I had met her. Just as we began our junior year, Mary Lou was kidnapped while riding her bike home from cheerleading practice. Her decomposing body was found two months later in the Freetown State Forest, tied to a tree. She was just 15.

I remember Mary Lou as always happy. She had shoulder-length, dark hair and, I believe, dark brown eyes. It was hard to tell then because she smiled so much; I only remember her eyes squinting while she laughed. In recent years we’ve seen all sorts of abominable depictions of cheerleaders in popular culture, some, such as Death of a Cheerleader, based on actual events. Mary Lou wasn’t like any of them. She didn’t know me from Adam, but she nevertheless said hello to me whenever we happened to be in the hallway at the same time, whether or not there was anyone around. She was a genuinely gracious, non-judgmental, carefree adolescent, and she made me feel as though it didn’t matter that I was something of a nerd, or new to the school. She was born to be an ambassador, and I can’t help feeling, even all these years later, the world is a whole lot less better off for her passing. Before I understood anything about the way our country has been turned slowly into a fascist police state; before I learned anything about how our military dictatorship has long persecuted those people who stand up for the rights guaranteed them by our Constitution but long denied them; before I realized that dissent against the fascists who’ve destroyed America simply is not possible, I couldn’t let rest the question, “How could this have happened to one so fundamentally decent?” Because the answer is both so simple and yet so horrific, I’ve resisted acknowledging its patent veracity – until now: fundamentally indecent people do all sorts of nefarious things to fundamentally decent people and get away with it because our society is structured to protect the fundamentally indecent among us. Turns out, crime does pay, and that truth is obvious to a sickening degree in the case that evolved around Mary Lou’s murderer, James M. Kater.

Kater was a part-time donut shop employee who was indicted a mere two months after Mary Lou’s disappearance for her kidnapping and murder. What made it so easy to find Mr. Kater was the fact that he had been convicted 9 years earlier for the bizarrely similar 1968 kidnapping of a 13 year-old North Andover girl, Jaclyn Bussierre, who escaped after also being tied to a tree. She later identified Kater as her assailant. He confessed to that crime and was sentenced to what appears to have been a radically insufficient sentence. At the time of Mary Lou’s disappearance, several witnesses who were on the same highway from where she was taken – including a friend with whom she had just stopped to speak – identified a car they witnessed force a girl on a bike off the road and into the woods. The car was identified as belonging to Kater.

Kater’s first conviction was overturned because of what was later ruled on appeal as inadmissible hypnotically-induced evidence. The state and Mr. Kater’s legal team fought three more times in court before the state achieved an airtight conviction – three times! All told, Kater was given 4 Massachusetts trials, 7 federal trials, and 1 Supreme Court petition for a hearing, which was denied on April 16, 2007, finally ending his bid for freedom nearly 30 years after his indictment. At the time of the Supreme Court decision, Kater’s was the longest murder trial in U.S. history. If you’re now expecting me to excoriate the state for not putting Kater to death sooner, or at all, you will be disappointed. I am proud to live in a state that does not have the death penalty. I do not believe the state should be involved in murdering people simply because the vast majority of people it tells us it needs to murder seem more and more frequently to be innocent of the crimes for which they are convicted. Troy Anthony Davis is scheduled to be executed by the State of Georgia on September 21st, and Stephen King couldn’t write a more terrifying story of horror that is his wrongful conviction, incarceration and impending death sentence. The self-confessed actual perpetrator of the murder for which Davis was convicted is walking around, free as bird, the state’s lone eyewitness. Any system that allows this type of miscarriage of justice ought not to exist – where even one innocent person may be wrongly put to death – but it does, and that’s why I’m against the death penalty. But read the sixth sentence of this paragraph again. That’s right – Massachusetts does not have the death penalty. And it hasn’t had the death penalty since 1951. The last execution to take place in Massachusetts was on May 9, 1947. This is the state that framed two Italian immigrants for a payroll robbery someone else confessed to having committed and wrongly executed Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti because it didn’t like their political views, after all. The judge, Webster Thayer, famously said of Vanzetti: “This man, although he may not have actually committed the crime attributed to him, is nevertheless morally culpable [for organizing workers to strike for better wages], because he is the enemy of our existing institutions.” (Let me remind you that the state’s key witness in the case against Troy Anthony Davis has confessed to no less than three people that he was the actual murderer of the person for whom Davis was convicted of murdering.) The death penalty is always selectively applied, and people of color, poor people and those who contest the unjust, so-called civil institutions in America are always more frequently those against whom the death penalty and tortures such as decades of solitary confinement are applied. That isn’t Kater. Other than the fact he is a psychopath with a predilection for torturing and killing young girls in the most heinous way possible, we still know very little about James Kater. I have a sense of unease about that in today’s world, where any school student in some Midwestern city or town can now freely help her parents kidnap a fellow classmate for sale into a sexual slavery ring, and the police will do nothing to help the kidnapping victim’s family to liberate her.

By now, you’re probably wondering why Kater was given so much legal assistance toward no practical end whatsoever, and this essay might well end here inasmuch as I don’t have an answer to that question. I only have more queries: where does an ex-con-cum-part-time donut maker get the money to finance all those decades of legal wrangling – all the expert witness testimony, all the depositions, all the court fees and lawyers’ fees? Who in their right mind would foot the bill for this, if Kater is unable to pay? Is that where the taxes of Massachusetts’ citizens have gone? Really? I understand some appeals are automatic in murder convictions, and that this type of three-ring circus would never happen today where the death penalty is the punishment to be applied, but, again, that's wasn't James Kater.  Thanks to Bill Clinton's Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which kills the innocent people our system has a predilection for killing even more quickly than ever before, appeals such as Kater's in states with the death penalty exists are no longer possible.  But a whole lot more than the type of public defender advocacy we see at the heart of so many wrongful convictions such as Troy Davis' has gone into serving Mr. Kater – when he was never even in danger of being put to death. Eleven trials and a Supreme Court petition! Why? How?  And Clinton's ATED Act doesn't have any bearing on them.

I worked at a law firm – at the time, Boston’s oldest, continuously operating law firm – for a decade, and I’ve seen some strange and immoral things done with the shuffling of reams of paper, but I still have no answer to this question, and so I must infer, as we must so often do in life, what went so horribly wrong for Mary Lou – and so fantastically right for Mr. Kater, who now sits in a prison cell (presumably, in the psych. unit of Walpole’s MCI-Cedar Junction), no chance for any more excursions to court that he enjoyed for three decades. I once had the opportunity to ask the attorney who represented my mother in my parents divorce why he no longer practiced family law, and he was shockingly candid in his reply: “The money is in defending drug dealers and other criminals. They’re the only ones who pay their bills.” I was not unaware of the manner in which Mother had settled her debt to this man, after she had foolishly bought herself a new car. In addition to receiving half the fee they had agreed upon, he also received all of the stocks and bonds my parents had invested in since I was a child – including original Disney stock. Obviously, crime pays. It pays many people, over and over again, because the money never seems to run out for criminals - which means, we have only ourselves to blame for propagating criminal enterprise. A recent viewing of the movie, The Whistleblower, the story of former Nebraska law enforcement officer Kathryn Bolkovac’s exposure of the sex slave ring run by members of the International Peacekeeping Forces - including, Americans - stationed in Bosnia in the 1990s (which was covered up and even promoted by high-level officials at the United Nations) gave me the sinking feeling that the sadomasochistic manner in which Ms. Bussiere and Mary Lou were treated by Kater probably served an extremely lucrative fetishistic sex and/or porn ring, which later provided the financing for his many bids for freedom. It could happen. It does happen. And it happens just like this untold millions of times around the world each and every day – because crime pays, and in a country and world were values are only disguises worn by fascists who believe each one of us is exploitable for market purposes and cannot possibly be a human being, it will only continue to happen until we’re all finally tearing one another to pieces for our 15 minutes of fame on Bully Beatdown, or in some other artificially engineered milieu designed by the social Darwinists who control us all. Coupled with the volumes of evidence proving that our judiciary has worked hand-in-hand with the secret forces of our military dictatorship to persecute legitimate civil and human rights activists, justice for the average citizens against the malfeasance of others appears to be impossible in America.

Some days, I wish school were as easy as it used to be.

[This is where a copyright would go, if I had the $35 to get one:  ;-) 2011 Saoirse]

Resurrecting Jesus

[Spoiler alert:  this essay is not an example of my usual skill and élan.  For the past several weeks, the covert warfare directed at me has increased exponentially:  toxic solvent/gas assaults, several unceasing noise campaigns, electromagnetic warfare, and radiation – both of which deplete my energy (and the will to do anything, as well as the cognition to do it, which is doubtless the purpose of them).  In the case of the latter assault, I am left with total body burns on my skin which make me look jaundiced at times (think the type of sunburn you get if you’re extremely Caucasian, go to the beach for the first time in a season and forget to wear sunscreen).  You’ll still want to at least peruse the links, which are, hopefully, uncorrupted, to get the full zeitgeist.  Sorry.  It is what it is.]

When I started this blog two years ago I had intended it to be a more or less regular journal of my thoughts and experiences as an American bioslave and status-less person targeted by our military dictatorship for political reprisal.  But fighting person-to-army this third civil war is, at times, a great distraction from not only this blog, but also from the true work I feel called to do, which is to expose our military dictatorship and its fascist infrastructure for what they are and hold them accountable for the millions and millions of murders they have committed with their bioslavery programs.   That, no doubt, is the intention of the third civil war.  Our military dictatorship’s leaders well know that the person who stops rowing is the one who is free to rock the boat, and that once it has made normal, civil life impossible for its targets, it has to otherwise occupy those targets with as much fighting for sheer survival that it can in order to give them no chance to plan and carry out any type of strategic offense.  It has no qualms about terrorizing and torturing them until they are dead.  What else is there for a target to do once she understands this?  To blog, or not to blog – that is the question nowadays for this target.  There is, though, something to keeping a tradition alive – to embracing what is most fundamentally human – and so, herewith, my 2011 Easter blog.

Today is Maundy Thursday.  When I was a very little girl and my parents took me to church on this sacred day, I somehow got the idea that this day was actually Easter.  I don’t know why.  Certainly, in our evangelical Lutheran church, we never heard such a thing proclaimed, and I was no different than any other child looking forward to the upcoming early morning egg hunt and family supper after Sunday services in a few days’ time.  Intellectually, I knew Maundy Thursday came before Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and egg-hunt-bunny-chocolate-and-glazed-ham Sunday, but there seemed something so odd about marking the day before Jesus’ martyrdom as a Holy day that I almost instinctively knew this day – of all the days of Lent – was actually the most important day of all, the true day deserving of observance.

Developmental psychologists tell us that a person’s personality is set by the time he or she is five years-old, and since I haven’t changed my opinion of Maundy Thursday in the last 44 years, I guess there’s something to that theory.  I suppose I never will stop believing that what’s most important about Jesus’ martyrdom is the very fact that he chose to make it in the first place – that, instead of running away from his persecution as the outlaw that he had been branded by Roman and Jewish authorities, he chose to face them and take whatever persecution they had in store for him.  (“Why am I here, Judas?  I’ve done nothing illegal,” which he actually said before his crucifixion).  That is the central message of the story of Jesus’ martyrdom – that he could have avoided it but didn’t, and instead, chose to die to prove to us that we, too, could die standing up to corrupt authorities in order to create a more just society for everyone; that we could not just live but also die for the sake of others less fortunate than us. 

That’s a loaded message in an age when we’re told – and repeatedly shown – ‘terrorists’ who blow up others along with themselves to prove their devotion to one or another authority:  civil, terrorist, or allegedly other-worldly.  But that’s not the same type of martyrdom Jesus undertook.  Deeply confused and twisted by hate, these backpack-bus bombers and brainwashed hijackers represent for us the very most debased hearts-and-minds corrupted warrior partly because we’re told that’s what they are – brainwashed youth used as fodder by their diabolic handlers – and partly because we choose not to look at how our own military dictatorship works assiduously to promote that image while at the same time undermining the development of true moral conviction by sanctifying and supporting only cults that idolize the image of Jesus as Messiah, or some other equally insidious and destructive type of cult – all at the same time it is becoming the most notorious terrorist organization in the world.  Yet, the message of sacrificing one’s self for the benefit of others who are less fortunate than us - at the hands of those who are vastly more fortunate - is as fundamental to the notion of a justice-seeking community, wherever that community may be, and however anachronistic it may seem to the vast majority of others today, as it was 2011 years ago.  Sadly, it’s relevant.

I haven’t observed Maundy Thursday rituals in a church for many decades.  I usually spend the evening alone, listening to Dvořák’s Stabat Mater.  That’s out of the question tonight, with the noise campaigns in full swing. (You didn’t really think your military dictatorship’s leaders would let a person who understands the Christic concepts as well as I do contemplate and gain strength from them any further on this day, did you?  That’s not how these mass murdering, fascist, arch hypocrites work.)  So I’m not sure where I’ll be this evening, but I do know that wherever I am, I will be meditating on this recent realization:  Messiahs are for the disempowered.  People who have power don’t need to be saved from those with whom they have thrown in their lot, the ultra-powerful.  The rest of us whom they feel they can use and disposed of have to stand up for ourselves and for those less fortunate than us, or face the impotent future, waiting for a Messiah that never comes.  If we could ask Jesus what he would advise us in these circumstances, I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t say, “Oh, don’t worry – I’ll be back sometime in the future to kick your oppressors’ asses.”

It’s not up to anyone else to stand in our place before the persecuting mob today and take the hits our oppressors have devised for us.  Foreclosed and improperly housed or unhoused; uninsured or insured and without proper medical care; overworked and unable to make ends meet - no matter who we are, or how little we have, each of us is fighting some type of battle today, and each of us is not alone.  We may not know what the interest rate, the unemployment rate, the new home starts will be tomorrow, or what the NASDAQ  is doing, but you can be sure there are always those in similar circumstances and those less fortunate – especially here, in the most powerful military dictatorship in the world, which has the most encompassing technology to wage its declared covert war against its dissidents known to man.  The message that someone else can and will do for us what we are otherwise called to do for ourselves is pernicious in the extreme, promoting a helplessness that in no way comports with the kingdom of G_d.  That’s not the most noble manifestation of the gift of humanity that is given to us.  Thankfully, there are those who are willing to sacrifice everything for themselves and those of their less fortunate loved ones, who are, for example, suffering in the abominable slavery our fascist leaders have devised vis-à-vis the medicoresearch industry, also known as the ‘healthcare’ industry.

Kristen LaBrie is the Lawrence, Massachusetts, mother of the autistic boy from whom she withheld chemotherapy treatment because she felt it was those drugs and not her suffering son’s disease that were killing him.  Ms. LaBrie is now civilly dead.  She was convicted on April 12th of attempted murder, battery on a disabled person and child endangerment for failing to give these universally acknowledged poisonous, so-called drugs to her son for five months after he went into remission.  She faced this absurd kangaroo court – which apparently has once again granted to the state the right to force lethal medical treatments on citizens – after watching her beautiful, already compromised, beloved son die of diseases our military dictatorship has long had the ability to create and for which it has developed only a similarly lethal treatment to which it has, with this type of jurisimprudence, enslaved us.  Kristen LaBrie courageously said, ‘enough is enough.’  She took the responsibility to lovingly and compassionately care for her dying son – and for it she has been repudiated as a murderess by minions of our military dictatorship.  I don’t know what her religious beliefs are, but her moral convictions are no less Christic in the most roundly fundamental sense than those of others who have proved their faelty to the values of Jesus, such as Martin Luther King, Jr., and I applaud her for having the courage to act as ethically as she has.  This is precisely the type of state protest in which Jesus sacrificed himself; we would do well to remember that part of the reason Jesus became so irksome to authorities was because he was providing the healthcare to the poor and beleaguered that other social institutions were not, and his followers rightly began to trust him more than they trusted the state.  Ms. LaBrie’s act is precisely the type of act American churches have inexcusably failed to recognize as just such a sacrifice – to its eternal shame and to the detriment of their followers.  Health justice is a piteously under-served social mission by all churches, and so, this Maundy Thursday, as I contemplate the many reasons the life and death of the very human Jesus of Nazareth should be studied with reverence, I pay homage to Kristen LaBrie and her willingness to sacrifice, acknowledging it to be both too profound and deep for me to comprehend fully and yet fully within my grasp as a compassionate, morally convicted human being.  I ask my readers, no matter their religious beliefs, to perform the same compassionate act, and think about how you will bear up under the oppressive conditions with which you will be faced in the coming year.  From what examples of moral strength will you derive the courage to acknowledge your oppression and seek ways to overcome it?  What sacrifice will you be willing to make to create ‘the kingdom of G_d’ with the hands tbat Jesus told us we could create it?  How will you embrace the message of the ‘Messiah?’  Go ahead and dig into the story, deeply, and see if you can find correlations in it to your own experiences.  Are you, too, the persecuted, or are you the persecutor?  Are you the one who needs a Messiah, or are you the hypocrite that sees no purpose to self-sacrifice for those less fortunate than yourself (that’s not the United States military dictatorship, by the way).  What parallels between the class-stratified social constraints Jesus faced and those you are facing today can you draw?  Isn’t this type of contemplation the best way we can honor Jesus this week?

I don’t know how I shall be able to overcome the enormous challenges I am facing today, but I do know this:  when no one else steps forward to be the Messiah, it’s time to be your own, like Kristen LaBrie has been for her son and, by example, other mothers facing the horrible decisions she has faced.  The time to act with courage no matter what condemnation, torture and physical pain we may face is the time when we feel most disempowered, most confused and most threatened.  It is in those times we are called to assert our right to exist as human beings – as ‘children of G_d,’ if you so chose to view G_d as a fatherly figure – in community with our civilized brethren (however few in numbers though they may seem to be at times).  The kingdom of G_d Jesus assured us human beings is possible for us to create is not the social Darwinistic world envisioned and forced upon us by the leaders of our military dictatorship.  It is a reality in which peace is as actively waged for the benefit of each and every individual – and not for the benefit of any mob, such as the American Medical Association and its paymaster, the fascist alliance between the Pentagon and so-called healthcare industry players – by each and every member of the kingdom of G_d.  Resurrect the spirit of Jesus for yourselves.  You are your only hope; I hope that is what Jesus’ martyrdom teaches you this week.

Good Holy Week, everyone - and happy Passover to my Jewish readers, out of the midst of whose ancestors the sage, Jesus, came.