DON'T EAT THE FUCKING TURKEY
After almost 10 months of being locked up at Vandalia “Correctional” Center one gets pretty tired of eating the same damn thing week after week; old canned vegetables, bread baked without yeast, mystery meat mixed with dubious soy, the cheapest food the state can legally get away with feeding us. When commissary comes around once, maybe twice a month, inmates scramble to get to the front of the line, like pigs at the trough but twice a year they treat us to a special holiday dinner, Thankstaking being one of them, but I will tell you one thing — I won’t eat the fucking turkey.
I’m not grateful for the bloody and continuous legacy of colonialism celebrated on columbus day (Indigenous People’s Day), nor do I see patriots day (9/11) as a day to remember anything but how the government is quick to condemn the actions of their enemies but easily dismiss the atrocities of their own.
I’m not grateful about how they cancelled 4 out of the 8 college/vocational classes here at Vandalia, with rumors that the last ones are next on the chopping block. If they do cancel them that would only leave basic education and the G.E.D. program (just recently reinstated this year), as the few opportunities people have to attain Earned Good Time off their sentences. In and out of prison they set us up to fail. They haven’t cancelled the meat or milk plants though, functions to keep the prison running. Also, the Good Conduct Time, reinstated in 2012, is received by practically no one; I have only seen one person my whole time here get any time off.
All this shows how despite all the hype in the mainstream media and lip service by liberal politicians about prison reform, nothing has changed but the loosening of the chains. Even if the 6000 inmates the Federal Sentencing Commission released from Federal Prison, we’d still have 2.5 million locked up and 7 million on parole or probation at any given moment. Yet this country claims the moral high ground as a beacon of freedom to justify their right to invade and impoverish other countries.
They always say the state is broke, they should just freaking let us go!
If they have enough resources to escalate the conflict in Syria with US special forces on the ground and invest in Arctic drilling to extract fuels and raise global temperatures to apocalyptic levels, they can cut their plans for austerity on the poor and increase social spending in the public sector.
So I will fast on Don’t Eat the Fucking Turkey Thankstaking Day and encourage others to do the same. I know it seems largely symbolic. It never seems like inmates, or even free range inmates ( we are all imprisoned under state capitalism) can do much to stop the rich and powerful. Every time there is an international conference of world leaders on climate change, many promises are made, but quickly they all go back on their words and it’s business as usual. The governments future for us is endless was, wage slavery, white supremacy, police violence, cuts on healthcare and education, gentrification, deportation and incarceration. We’ll see the waters rise and the rich in their houses on the hill and the poor with nowhere to go.
We have nowhere to go but to overthrow this cannabalistic culture. If we all stopped working for the state and resisted, we could bring the prison system to its knees. Eating that turkey will be the desertification of the soul. I refuse!
Instead lets tell the stories of anti-colonial resistance that day. Let’s talk about the Seminoles, Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, John Brown, I.W.W., the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground, the Zapatistas, the Rojava Revolution, Assata’s Daughters, Black Lives Matter, Occupy, ELF, ALF, Idle No More, the Arab Spring and the many rebellions past, present and future.
And don’t forget the day after raise hell on #buynothingday #furfreefriday #fuckFBIfriday #blacklivesmatterfriday!
with love and rage,
Jason
