Beyond the Valley of the Vallow [View all]

[H2O Man]

"I spent 20 years in prison, in a hell hole where people everyday tried to strip me of my dignity. I did nothing to be there. .... I did not belong there. Because I refused to follow their rules, I spent 10 of my 20 years in solitary confinement -- 6 feet underground, 5 slices of stale bread a day. I was stinking and starving. There was no morning, noon, or night -- just different shades of darkness. Hate took over everything." -- Rubin "Hurricane" Carter


My older son and his girlfriend visited. They talked about their workplace. She said, "It's really dysfunctional, but people ave adjusted, and the work gets done." This reminded me of two things: first, Erich Fromm's classic 1955 book, "The Sane Society," and second, one of Rubin's friends in Rahway State Prison, joining Carter in atalk with an amateur boxer who was angry and prone to hateful responses to his surroundings. Fromm's book details how difficult it can be for sane people to navigate in an insane society. Rubin and his friends would expand on their efforts, to create what became Rahway's "Scared Straight" program. The angry teenager listened to Carter's advice, hung up the gloves, and went on to become a sociqal worker. (Indeed, I used a modified "Scared Straight" with the help of my brothr-in-law, who worked at a correctional facility, when I worked with teens.)

Communities can reach a level of dysfunction when there is widespread issues of violence, poverty, drug abuse, and other problems. That dysfunction multiplies in force when a percentage of people experience what is known as shared delusional thinking. I do not think it is the long arm of coincidence wrenching itself out of socket to hold that we passed that point when Donald Trump got elected president. Most of us have family, friends, co-workers, and/or neighbors who, when it comes to politics, are as delusional as, say, Lori Vallow Daybell is about religion. Thus, in my opinion, we find ourselves existing in a dysfunctional society at this time. Our collective response will determine if we plunge further into an insane society.

Rubin's friend Tommy spoke of how when a person first enters prison, and a system different than anything they have previousle experienced, they tend to behave in a certain pattern. At first, the observe how that system operates. Soon, they adjust their behaviors in a manner that provides some degree of safety in an unsafe setting. And then, they become part of that sick system. That change in their behaviors becomes entrenched, thus explaining why rates of recidivision is so high upon their release. Dysfunction has become ingrained.

A significant percentage of republicans -- including people you and I knew as decent, rational people -- now are inhabiting the Valley of Vallow, where delusional thinking saturates their being. And, again, our individual and collective response will determine the future.


"Every 15 days we were allowed to take a shower, and every 30 days we were given a physical exam. During one of the checkups, I walked by a mirror. I saw a grotesque image. I saw the face of hatred, a monster, and that monster was me. I realized that Iwas not hurting them. They were hurting me. Hatred and bitterness only consumes the vessel that holds it." -- Rubin Carter

Back in 2001, after listening to Rubin speak at Binghamton University, a professor there asked a friend to ask me if I could get Rubin to add a chapter to a book she was writing. She had been raised in a brutal household, and the emotional scars that remained were extremely difficult for her to deal with. The quotes I am using here are from Rubin's contribution to her book.. He began with his thoughts on pain as a part of suffering, before talking about the amazing writings of Victor Frankl about his experiences in a concentration camp.

Frankl's writings played an essential role in Rubin's transformation, from a hostile man wrongly incarcerated, to becoming free. He knew that this would demand that he forgive those responsible for his incarceration -- the two convicts who were pressured into lying about him, the three cops who planted "evidence," and the prosecutors, judges, and juries. "I had to first forgive myself," he wrote. "I had to understand the conditioning. People are not born hating others or themselves. Their hate did not have to become my hate. ....

"... I came to an understanding of who and what I am. Like Victor Frankl wrote about concentration camps, I realized that prison provided me the tools to become all that I could be. I was able to seize the opportunity to use the horrible conditions to find something above the law. I had an opportunity to go on an anthropological expedition into an unnatural laboratory of the human spirit."

When a single piece on a mobile hanging above an infant's crib shifts, the other pieces must also shift. As Rubin changed, he found that those around him changed as well. It was a slow process, of course, but came to include not only those around him in prison, but also his circle outside of prison. This included members of his circle being motivated to uncover evidence that would be used in his final appeal -- including some from that former angry teen turned social worker. Rubin would attribute his winning in the federal courts to his transformation as a human being.

Few of us will ever be confronted with the type of circumstances that Rubin was confronted with. Yet, he could relate on a personal level with the issues the university professor was dealing with. He told her that, "ro forgive yourself and your parents, you need to understand that you too are a machine. I am no different, you are no different. There are no saints. It is the way we were created. We are all savages on this earth. We are as much of a machine as your lawnmower. Your reactions are the same as mine or anyone else's. But you have the ability to wake up. That's your salvation. Somehow, some way, you have to get over it."

Rubin used to tell me that every day we are alive on this beautiful, living earth, is a miracle. He also recommended that I move my family up near him in Canada, because he thought the United States resembled the crumbling empires of the past. Yet he believed that the good people in this country had the ability to transform it into a more perfect union, but that this would require a significant number of citizens to "wake up" (not to be confused with the misused "woke" we witness today). This was not some type of "religious" hokey-pokey, for Rubin viewed most "religious" leaders as charlatans. It was his belief that human beings were the highest level of unconsciousness of the earth, capable of becoming the earth consciousness. To transform the severe damage humankind has done to what we call the environment in recent centuries. And that this transdormation is on both the individual and group level.