apology

I wish to express my heartfelt sorrow and deep regret for awful and frightening statements that were made by me. I have made a terrible mistake and said terrible things, words that have caused hurt and emotional injury to so many. Hate speech is reprehensible, and has no place in society. I can only humbly ask for your forgiveness and your understanding, in the name of a loving God who has created us all in God’s image. I believe that every human being is able to experience God’s love and infinite mercy, so in the spirit of forgiveness, I humbly ask that you try to forgive me for the sins that I have committed. If I am deserving of that forgiveness, I count myself fortunate. If not, then I pray that I might strive to be deserving of mercy and forgiveness before I leave this beautiful world. I hold no hate in my heart for any human being.
In 1995 I was teaching ESL and traveled to Central America on Spring Break. I became very ill with thyroid disease. I had surgery to remove a tumor from my neck. I developed an autoimmune disease. Terrible symptoms came and went, and the relapses got worse over time. Severe muscle spasms made it impossible to turn my head or breath normally. All the muscles enervated from my spine would draw tighter and tighter. Constant intense neck pain at C4, the fourth vertebra. Muscle dysfunction so severe that I injured myself just putting on a shirt or opening a window. It sounds ridiculous that someone could get a pulled muscle from putting on a shirt, or opening a window, but it’s been like that for many years. Vertigo, tinnitus, extreme fatigue, night sweats, muscle atrophy from normal activity. Off and on for three years I passed blood in my stool. While sitting at rest I had labored breathing, like I was running up stairs. I don’t know how to describe what I went through. Myelin sheath is what insulates nerves and makes up the white matter of the brain. My body was attacking these cells. If you strip the insulation off of electrical wiring it doesn’t work so well. In the fifth year of illness, I was unable to sleep for six months. People can have auditory and visual hallucinations after just a few days without sleep. Loss of appetite led me to go from 180lbs to 120lbs in a few months. I contemplated suicide to end my suffering and avoid winding up in a nursing home. When I was alone I would often say out loud things like “I wish I was dead”, and “If you had any guts you’d kill yourself”. It seemed like someone else was speaking. I experienced extreme mood swings between depression and anger. During periods of extreme suffering from a neurological illness that caused a physical and emotional breakdown, I have used offensive language, made deeply regrettable statements, and I have made racial slurs, what can only be described as hate speech. I am not a racist but during episodes of terrible anguish I have gone on angry rants and said awful things, cursing God and man. If the entire tape is played it will show that at the end of the recording I suddenly realize that I have been speaking on the phone to a friend. I come out of a mental fog and immediately ask him how long I've been speaking and what I've been saying. He confirms to me that I had been ranting and raving a hate filled diatribe. My friend of five years never called again. I ask people to please give weight to the life I have lived, rather than statements I have made while in a state of extreme distress due to a terrible illness. In 1992 I quit my job at NASA to teach ESL to minority children. I've routinely traveled to Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. I have frequently lived in neighborhoods and worked in environments where I was a minority, and I have dated females from every conceivable ethnic background. I could have easily lived surrounded by my own race but chose not to. It may be inevitable that I am portrayed as a racist Nazi but nothing could be farther from the truth, (Half my family died fighting Fascism and Communism). I have said terrible things, hate speech, and I deeply regret saying hurtful things. That is not how my parents have raised me. When I was in second grade my parents took me to the Boys Club where I played basketball in a league, and spent all my free time during the summer, all through school. In the 1960’s most American towns were divided by the railroad tracks. My parents took me across the tracks to see how other people in minority neighborhoods lived. They made me aware that I had certain advantages that other people did not have. I learned not to judge people on how they looked, and I learned to get along with all kinds of people from different walks of life. On any given day when I was nine or ten years old, I might have played sports with the poorest kid in town, and later played with the wealthiest kid in town. My first roommate after high school was an African American friend. In my twenties I learned martial arts from two African American friends. When I was thirty years old I quit working at NASA and started teaching ESL to minority students. I moved into a Hispanic neighborhood in Houston, called the Heights. My neighbors were from Central America, and they helped me learn Spanish. I later lived on the north east side of Houston, the largest African American neighborhood in Houston. In 2002 I bought a house in a minority neighborhood in Lubbock, Texas. The offensive and frightening things I said have hurt a lot of people and I deeply regret saying them. It may be too much to ask, or to expect... I’ve made a mistake, I’m very sorry, I humbly ask that people try to forgive me. People may not be able to forgive me for saying these hateful things, but I at least want them to understand why this happened. Please do not let these past mistakes allow innocent people to continue to suffer terrible torment. I am willing to be painfully honest with people so that this terrible undeclared war on political activists and whistleblowers might end. I’ve learned there are no perfect people and I’ve learned the hard way not to judge people because you just can’t know what someone is going through.
I would like to take this opportunity to speak to all my fellow countrymen, to speak about race relations and the state of our society. America has two or three million men incarcerated and most of them are minority males. The US has created the largest gulag in its history, exceeding even that put in place by Communist Russia. These men have been warehoused and are rotting away. Are these people all guilty of assault, robbery, murder? No, many of them were caught in possession of a controlled substance. Society has decided to lock them up and throw away the key. This policy is unjust and a huge waste of our national wealth. In the years following the Civil War this country established a system of separate but equal, but in practice it was nothing short of an American Apartheid. In the southern states African American men were systematically arrested on charges of vagrancy or other vague terms and imprisoned indefinitely and used as slave labor for large companies. It was not called slavery and so it succeeded for decades and only ended shortly before WWII, under pressure from black leaders who threatened not to cooperate in the war effort. After the war men came home who had fought bravely against Fascism and they demanded an end to this American Apartheid. The nonviolent struggle eventually succeeded and the legal framework of separate but equal was dismantled. It was not the end of history. Laws cannot compel men to do what they should do of their own free will. Many people raised under this system that delegated our African American brothers and sisters to second class citizenship cannot make the intellectual and spiritual leap. As it is in many manners of change, it may only happen over time, when one generation passes and a new generation arises. I do not ask people of this generation to stand trial for the crimes of slavery and Apartheid. I do hold that you should know your own history, and that you should let it inform your actions today and in the future. During the drug wars of the last two generations a terrible price has been paid. In the 1980’s the crack epidemic sparked a war in the African American community and young black men were killing other young black men at the approximate rate of about seven thousand deaths a year. During the Vietnam War American the worst year for combat deaths was nine thousand killed in action. Basically, America experienced a Vietnam War scenario fought on our own soil. The cost of the drug war fell upon minority neighborhoods. Today the number of deaths is not as high as it was at the height of the crack epidemic, but life in these neighborhoods remains one of poverty and violence. We need to take stock of our situation and make wise and humane judgments about what to do to solve this problem. We have tremendous violence in many of our minority inner city neighborhoods and the drug war rages on into its third generation. We have several million minority males and poor white males incarcerated. We have exceeded the total number of prisoners of our totalitarian Communist enemies. How did we get here, how did it come to this? In my opinion part of the problem is that minority males have absorbed by osmosis the belief that their lives are worth less, that they are second class people. America created the throwaway society, and African American males, Hispanic males, and poor whites have basically been thrown away. These human beings are being warehoused at tremendous cost and the only people who win in this situation are the corporations that run prisons and the unionized guards that work there. I am arguing that most of these people have had substance abuse problems and the answer to their problem and our problem is not to lock people up and throw away the key. If someone in Hollywood has a substance abuse problem and gets caught in possession of a controlled substance they get a pass from the criminal justice system and check into rehab. If poor people get caught in possession of a controlled substance they go to prison for decades. It is a blatant double standard. The fallout of the drug war has created a drug-gun culture that draws people into it and is the source of never ending violence in minority neighborhoods. These young men are set up to fail and they destroy themselves. The concept of personal responsibility is integral to a just society, but the conditions of life are unequal from early childhood, to school, to the job market. We can have after school sports programs in every school, but if young men have no prospect of a job that leads to a better life, a future, a home, a family, a decent lifestyle, then nothing will change. Flipping burgers or going into the military is all the job prospects many of these young people coming out of conditions of poverty have before them. These young people know they face violent death or incarceration and so naturally they are nihilistic, fatalistic, and engage in self destructive death seeking behaviors. Most people in this drug-gun culture would gladly choose an alternative life, but our society offers them none. All happy talk aside, flipping burgers is not a solution, it is not a path to getting out of poverty. Our society is always changing and evolving our social norms. We change a little bit every day and in so doing we become better for it. Today we are moving towards more acceptance of people who are gay, and we are beginning to allow people their humanity, to accept all of God’s children, and we are better for it. What about the drug-gun culture, what about our gulag, our prison industrial complex. It is worse than intolerance, it is worse than hate speech, it is slow murder. These minority males and poor whites are buried alive. It is our dirty little secret, it is our shame, and it is a crime. The historical motivation to make the controlled substance act was racial discrimination. Cannabis was made illegal to target Mexican migrant workers. Cocaine was made illegal because authorities in the south feared African American males would be uncontrollable. The motivation in making these substances illegal was to make these human beings illegal. Now here we stand in the 21st Century with millions of young men permanently disenfranchised, marginalized, and warehoused. Well you might argue, that was then and this is now. Our motivations are different. Let me ask you this, if the system were a machine, and this machine vacuumed you up into its belly, never to return, if this machine gobbled up millions of men, if this machine trapped half the minority males, if it caught only the poor white males, if the machine is going to bury you alive…what difference does it make if the machine did so on purpose, or by accident. If someone is going to kill you by accident or on purpose, you’re still just as dead…and such a machine is just as evil. This system has set a trap for young people because it glorifies this drug-gun culture, it offers precious few other means to succeed, and it lays out the apple of temptation of easy money. Where is our indignation when gun violence kills thousands of innocent bystanders in the hood? Where is our indignation at the incarceration and living death of an entire generation? We censor ourselves in our manners and we despise hate speech as we should, but where is the sense of proportional response, where is our determination to change the drug-gun culture? Why do we tolerate an American gulag. Are half the young African American young men evil at birth such that they should suffer either spiritual or physical death? Where are our wise men? Where our leaders on this question? Who among us will deliver the young men from this living death? Will candidate number one from the elephant party, candidate number one from the Donkey party? Why not them? If not them, then who? No political candidate ever got more votes by showing mercy and letting prisoners walk into freedom. Where I come from the chief politician has signed 234 death warrants and became more popular for it. Who will turn this nightmare train around? Will this President…the next President…the one after that? No they won’t, of course not because politically they cannot afford to. So, we well-meaning whites like myself, sit in our suburbs far from the violence, we sit in our gated communities. We should demand courtesy and respect for each other as the hallmark of a just and civil society. These other problems we can afford not to think about because they make us uncomfortable, these problems don't seem to have answers. These problems don’t concern us sufficiently to make us raise hell because these are not children of the suburbs. I’ve lived in the hood for a while, long enough to understand the sheer toll of violence. When I lived in Houston small children not too far away from me died in their beds, killed in drive by shootings. During prohibition in Chicago there were 500 murders a year over who would control the huge money stream from selling illegal alcohol. One day, the mob boss of one faction sprayed bullets at a rival and missed but accidently killed a nine year old kid. The entire town erupted as one and the green light was on…meaning within two weeks the most powerful mob boss in Chicago was dead. He had crossed a red line that shall not be crossed. There are no more red lines, that was the good old days. Last year not too far away from where I live, near Washington DC a drug mule from Dickenson, Texas killed two women and two small children with a .45 caliber pistol. The press painted an ugly picture of the women, telling how they had lived in squalor in house filled with garbage and no running water. A few days later the brother of the victim made a statement that contradicted the press story to the effect that his sister was not involved in criminal activity. Where was the collective revulsion like Prohibition era Chicago? The image of two women and two small children being murdered by a man with a .45 did not provoke our society. There were other more spectacular crimes that year, namely a drive by shooting of a dozen people by a teenager with an AK-47. The mother of one of one murdered teen described how she shielded her daughter from violence and made every effort imaginable, and in the end she lost her daughter to violence anyway. The Children of Chicago are dying. Dozens are killed every year such that all the children in minority neighborhoods have lost friends and family and have seen human beings being gunned down right before their eyes. Where is the indignation, where is the collective rage? Are we as a society so used to seeing people murdered on TV that we no longer know the difference. Are we so numb from real violence we feel helpless? Where is our righteous anger? Do these lives in poor neighborhoods have no value to us? Who will find a solution and cut the Gordian knot? Prohibition began in 1922 and ended in 1933, almost 80 years ago. How will history judge us if we continue to imprison and institutionalize half of all African American males. Will we appear any different in their eyes than the people who lived in the 1850's and tolerated slavery, or the people in the 1950's who tolerated the American Apartheid?