For the past few years I have been running in a small informal half-marathon organized by local prison abolitionists raising money for groups like Strength in the Circle. This year the timing has not worked out but I wanted to do something. I’m not a big fan of promoting myself doing something ‘hard’ as though that should inspire anyone even less that I would learn something in any way related to the hardships of the people I hope to support. Anywho.
So what I am planning is to camp at Camp Marcedes one night then walk to Stony Mountain Penitentiary where I will camp out near their cemetery (which I happened to notice on Google Maps) and walk home the next day. Walking like writing is one way that I process or metabolize things. I have a strong sense of what we can do as a society to help address the realities that have led to a carceral approach to crime and poverty as well as our abuse of Indigenous populations and Treaty obligations. There are immediate material and economic supports that would make an immediate impact. That being said I also feel that there are larger realities of public apathy, fear, prejudice, internalized and externalized aggression that keep us from the resolve and capacity for change that is needed. There are knots about being human that I believe ultimately require psychic/spiritual/soul /ritual/whatever work. Unless some of us do this work we may never have the capacity for the material and social changes that are needed.
For myself I am trying to learn the disciplines of holding things together that individually and collectively we want to divide. Some realities are hard or uncomfortable and so naturally we will avoid or rationalize them. As a society we know that wealth was founded on land theft, build up through slavery and an explicitly racist economy and laws. Wealth is then concentrated with wealth begetting wealth which gets passed on through inheritance laws. Of course there are always instances of rags to riches and dramatic falls from power but these don’t detract from the overall environment of how wealth works.
My lifestyle barely registers as middle class but I still attribute this to the combination of good health, lack of prejudice, abundance of privilege and perhaps above all a stable social support network that had material and emotional support for my ambitions and challenges. For those of us with such benefit it is tempting to separate our experience from those who struggle and suffer in the same society. I think we try keep these realities separate and justified by the simple ideas of luck and merit. Some have bad luck, some good. Some work harder than others. This allows us varying levels of sympathy and charity but it never holds all our lives together considering that perhaps one experience of success is somehow the function of another’s experience of suffering in our society. So long as we hold success and suffering separately it will be hard to see the world rightly never mind build capacity for the changes that are needed.
So on this walk I simply want to hold the realities of wealth, privilege, safety, violence, fear, greed, abuse, poverty and incarceration together that they might be at work in me shaping my thoughts, developing my posture and directing my actions. I am comfortable calling this prayer which I am also comfortable saying is a practice of paying attention to what matters most. So I hope to pay attention to the scared fire at Camp Marcedes honouring those unjustly murdered who are awaiting their home coming. I plan to walk up Main St and across Selkirk Ave paying attention to our city’s ongoing neglect of its citizens. And then hold those isolated in prison in prayer remembering that as society the best we can do in response harm and suffering is to cage humans.
So please give to organizations like Barnone, Sunshine House, Manitoba Harm Reduction Network, Strength in the Circle but don’t let that be a simple transaction a payment to absolve your conscience. Learn the practices that hold and see our society as a whole knowing it is all connected. Don’t assume the answers advance but learn to gather in places we have banished and neglected and let yourself be changed.
David CL Driedger 