Doing Hard Time With Cindy

September 29, 2005
Washington DC

Our Washington peace protests are in high gear and Peace Mother Sheehan (PMS) is receiving extensive news coverage. Finally our country is focusing again on important issues after being sidetracked by that stupid hurricane stuff. While I am a compassionate liberal and love all people, if I see one more person blubbering on TV about losing his house I’m going to puke! Don’t these people realize that we are protesting to SAVE THE WORLD? Do they even realize that Cindy, myself, and over 300 other peace patriots were imprisoned by this administration? HELLO?

As a result of our arrests and imprisonment, I have been changed forever. Nothing in my life prepared me for the horrors of doing “hard time” in the bowels of the Right Wing’s Abu Ghraib-like gulag. Thank God my cellmate was Cindy; I couldn’t have survived without her.

Our cell was small, dirty, and furnished with only a sink, toilet, and 2 bunks. It smelled of urine and Mr. Clean and profane graffiti covered the walls. The food was unpleasant and no vegetarian alternatives were available. I don’t know how much weight we lost but it was no doubt plenty due to our diminished appetites coupled with the severity of our environment.

After a while, the mind-numbing solitude and sensory depravation begins to erode your mental process and you slowly start losing touch with reality. Time seems to stand still and it takes everything you’ve got just to hang on to your last shred of sanity.

If it weren’t for Cindy’s loving and tender touch and whispered words of encouragement I would have succumbed to the madness. We turned to each other in our time of suffering and found the strength we needed to survive. Our salvation was found in each other’s arms while remembering the beauty of a sunset, the majesty of a tall oak, the smell of fresh air after a spring rain, freedom.
Our crude jailhouse tattoos will forever signify the bonding of our bodies and souls and the strength of our spirits that sustained us through the darkness.

Difficult and horrifying as it was, those 4 hours in jail made us both stronger and more determined than ever to carry on the fight, together.