Exile Nation: Chapter Three, "The Sweet Moline" (Pt.6)

Go here if you missed Chapter One, "Dead Time", Chapter Two, "Hotel Hell" or the beginning of Chapter Three. 

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August 9th, 2005

Further applications of the metaphor of prison being “Hell.”  As of today, there have been thirty-one 90+ degree days this summer. It is fucking hot! These cellblocks are uninhabitable brick ovens most of the time as it’s too hot to be in here, but most of the time we don’t have a choice. I can squeeze a few hours in at the library, which has AC, but that’s about it. It’s been so hot they have canceled all outside movement a few times. Trying to sleep at night is futile. There is no airflow through the cells, and worse, the bricks radiate the heat they soaked up all day. And I’m on the top bunk. Most times you can’t even move, and you sweat and stick to the mattress and the hot itchy fake wool blankets they give you. They have all these huge fans blowing air around, which helps a bit if you wet yourself down and stand in front of them, you can cool down a bit…for a minute. You get so dehydrated at night you get these miserable headaches and cramps. This suh-huh-hucks! I wanna talk to the manager!

August 10, 2005

Last night at the li-berry I helped a brother named Earnest type a letter to the Department of Child and Family Services in the hopes of helping the mother of his four children retain parental custody.  After I wrote it out, ran it by him, and then typed it out for him, he asked me what I wanted in payment. I told him nothing, it was my pleasure, and that I felt that no family should ever have to be split up when they don’t want to be, particularly when there are as many clearly mitigating factors as Earnest described. I mean, sure, he could have played me and made the whole thing up, but it sounded a lot more like a typical DCFS screw job than the fact that his kids were in danger.

Yes, Earnest got caught selling drugs and admitted he sold them, which was why he was at The Sweet Moline. What people outside those communities don’t realize is that sometimes it’s one of the only choices people have. It’s very easy for some white middle-class person far removed from that level of hardship to judge what Earnest did and say, “he could have gotten a job and earned the money honestly.” Well, actually, no, he couldn’t. Earnest had a good job as a security guard, but he got laid off, and couldn’t find other work. He had four kids to feed. He had no college education. He decided to sell some drugs, he got caught, he went to prison, even though it was his first offense. Now, the state was trying to take his kids away from him. Yet he was always calm and composed, carried around a bible, and talked about the Lord more than anything else. Ladies and gentlemen I submit to you, where is the hardened criminal here? He was no thug, he was just somebody’s Pops, makin’ ends.

I complained to Earnest and Tommy and Darryl who had come around later that I had been waiting for weeks for a package to arrive that had a money order Edie put together for me so I could buy the few basic amenities you need to survive on the inside. I had been there more than a month, and I still didn’t have soap, toothpaste, toothbrush, much less more than one change of underwear or some basic commodities like instant coffee and commissary food. They don't give you these things, everything you need to live is for sale, and until you get money, you get nothing. Earnest said he’d pray for the safe arrival of my package.

Lo and behold the package showed up today full of great stuff. Letters and cards, photos of my dog, stationary for letter writing (which you can’t use because you have to buy and use officially sanctioned IDOC “write out” letter stock) but…not the money. Someone had taken the money order out.

I was simultaneously enraged and heartbroken, and it wasn’t as if I could go ask someone about it. There was no one to talk to about it, nothing I could do. I knew someone in the mailroom opened my package and lifted my money order, but I could never prove it. You are so helpless in here, and it’s so easy for them to exploit you; what are you going to do about it? So they trample your dignity that way, then they expect you to just sit there silent and take it. The grievance process is long and ultimately fruitless. It’s part of the other oppressive theme of prison, patience. Nothing happens quickly for the inmate, and no one is lining up eager to help you.

The rage was totally fucking with my head. I wanted to snap. I forced myself to go back to my cell and shut the door until I calmed down. It was very hard. It took every ounce of self-restraint I had in me. There was so much pounding down on me. It dawned on me while I paced back and forth across my doorway that I kept being brought back to the same message: Slow down. Be quiet. Think. I’ve been plagued my whole life with a reckless and profound sense of impatience and impetuousness. It has always been one of my most glaring character flaws, and the source of immeasurable suffering. And now, I couldn’t help but wonder if this prison was some kind of Divine test, immersion-therapy for the chronically impatient. I just wish I didn’t have to come here to learn, but I suppose that since I was unable to learn out there in the world, life found a way to school me, in here.

I told Earnest and Tommy about it later that night at the li-berry. Both seemed hopeful that it was a “clerical mishap” but I think we all knew better. You don’t just “mishap” money in a prison mailroom. Gimme a break.

Earnest told me to “have faith” and said that the rage I was feeling was “the Devil gettin’ all up in me during a moment of weakness.” I silently acknowledged him the metaphor if not the whole shebang.

“I prayed for you to get your package, and I have no doubt that the good lord has your money taken care of as well.”

Although I had always been taught that God was not particularly enamored of banking, oh what with sending his kid to ghetto stomp the money-changers in the Temple and all, I also couldn’t help but wonder if this was also to see how much of my resolve I had retained since those few weeks in the cooler at Stateville when I vowed to reexamine my life. The whole “god” thing was still to me like the experience of wearing a wool sweater when I was a kid: it’s hot and itchy and uncomfortable, but it comes in real handy during those few moments when you are really exposed to the elements.

It remains to be seen what happens to the money. I have a feeling that in the coming days this experience will prove to be much more valuable than I see now. The insanity of impatience is the proverbial mental prison you hear about all the time, but unlike the joint, you are both the inmate and the jailer of your own mind.

When I got back to C Wing for night count I received word that my six months of good time had been approved, making my official release date September 9th. Only a month away! I need to stay out of trouble. But man, trouble has no problem finding me. It’s like my neurochemical system is ionically charged to actively conduct trouble out of the atmosphere, like a big naughty lightning rod. I mean if I could find an engineer who could help me transduce it I could probably power my neighborhood. I’m going to have to take a serious look at that too.



August 11, 2005

"The American people are as dedicated to the idea of sin and its punishment as they are to making money. And fighting drugs is nearly as big a business as pushing them. Since the combination of sin and money is irresistible (particularly to the professional politician) the situation will only grow worse. The media constantly deplore the drug culture and, variously, blame foreign countries like Columbia for obeying the iron law of supply and demand to which we have, as a notion and as a nation, sworn eternal allegiance. In 1989, the former drug czar, William Bennett declared, ‘I find no merit in the drug legalizers case. The simple fact is that drug use is wrong. And the moral argument, in the end, is the most compelling argument: of course.’ Of course, what this dangerous comedian thinks is moral James Madison and Virginia statesman and rights man George Mason would have thought dangerous nonsense, particularly when his “morality” abolishes their gift to us all, the Bill of Rights."

– Gore Vidal, “Shredding the Bill of Rights” (1998)

Yashua “gets it.” Today in “Pre-Start” he broke it down.

He starts with, “Gentlemen, you may all have heard that our nation is waging a ‘War on Drugs’. Do not be fooled, gentlemen. There is no…such…thing…happening. Our government is not at all interested in stopping the flow of drugs into this country. It is dedicated to arresting and incarcerating as many poor people…which usually means black people…as they can get their hands on. Trust me gentlemen, police are not stopping and searching white people on the street in the suburbs, and those people consume five times the drugs that black folk do. You need first and foremost to understand this, and if you fail to understand this, you will continue to be a guest of the State of Illinois. Twenty years ago there were virtually no black men in Federal prison. Now, the Fed joints are overflowing. And you must also understand that Federal prisons exist for those caught obtaining illegal money.”

He repeated that last part a couple more times: obtaining illegal money. It was clear most of the inmates didn’t get it. Yashua explained that virtually everyone in a Federal prison is there on a charge that relates to obtaining money by illegal means, which, more importantly, was also never taxed. Whether it was by manipulating the stock market, trafficking guns or drugs, or robbing pensions, if you got your money by illicit means and didn’t cut the government in, you’re S.O.L. You don't find junkies and prostitutes and burglars in Federal prison.

“You can make money any way you want, so long as you pay your tax,” Yashua said. “Sometimes you just need to be clever about how you pay them, know what I’m sayin’?”

He was on a roll, and he kept hittin ‘em with stuff, and they were really starting to pay attention now.

“Manuel Noriega…you remember who that was? He was the leader of Panama. And back while George Bush’s daddy was President, one of the first things he did was to invade Panama and snatch up Noriega and bring him back to the US and put him on trial as a drug dealer. He’s in a Federal prison now for life. What you got to understand is that Noriega was the middleman in the cocaine trade. Panama’s banks held drug money. But who was moving the cocaine? And mind you, this is the cocaine that ended up in our neighborhoods and gave so many of us our, uh, new professions. This is where the crack came from! It was the crew Bush’s daddy put together to get guns to the Contras in Nicaragua. Panama was where all this merch connected, guns heading south, cocaine heading north, money staying in the middle.

“Does anyone here remember the Iran-Contra scandal? Noriega had the goods on Bush, and he started talkin’ bout how he was gonna tell, so they had to snatch him.  Whatever you have been told about the drug trade, you haven’t been told the whole story, and most of what you know is wrong. And if you continue to have the wrong information, you will continue to be a victim of the system, and you will come back. Empower yourself with information, gentlemen.”

Although drug possession is a victimless crime, robbing someone because you need a fix is not, and there is a substantial chasm of difference between recreational and even heavy drug users, and chronic addicts who are so desperate that they are willing to break other laws to feed their habits, or are so sick or irrational that they are a danger to others. 

I’ve been on both sides of the fence with this one. In the 1990s I was bingeing out of control on cocaine and I would steal to feed my habit. It was awful, and it hurt people emotionally and financially. Those were crimes that deserved punishment, and I accept that. I feel great shame about doing the things I did. And even though part of me could argue that at the time I was beyond my ability to intervene and stop myself, I did on a few occasions cross the line away from a victimless crime, and so some form of justice was necessary.

So if these inmates here do feel shame about the victims they have created, and they have an addiction to blame it on (which is what I interpret them to mean when they embrace being addicts), then they can plausibly deny to themselves any real responsibility for their behavior. It may be the only thing left that permits them to continue living with themselves.

Most of the black inmates view dealing as a means to an end, a replacement economy. They have no illusions about the levels of corruption in the system, nor how high up the food chain it goes. They know the drugs they sell—cocaine and heroin—are bad for you, they’ve seen their families and neighborhoods decimated by them. They also know the cops are dirty, they see that every day too. In talking to many of them, there is a common understanding that drugs are actively and knowingly trafficked into this country and their neighborhoods are openly targeted.  What is less understandable is why so many consent to and participate in the destruction of their communities. There is not a lot of civic pride going around, if you feel me.

I have such unrealistic hopes and expectations for the black community. You’d think it would be easy to explain “divide and rule” but it’s not. And in hearing their immediate concerns—fearing who, over their shoulder, is trying to take them out—you learn new depths to the “divide” part. The biggest problem is the generational gap. These young boys are so divorced from their history and any awareness of the system they live in that they can’t feasibly be anything but operational cogs in an entrenched system. Without any knowledge of who or what they are, they can’t become something else. The older brothers have a much firmer grasp of what‘s really going on, but they don’t have a real good relationship with the younger generation. A huge chunk of them have been in and out of prison all their children’s lives, and another huge chunk never made it to middle age.

If the young boys could be educated to understand what the older men understand, there might be hope for them. They are so much smarter and more creative than people will ever give them credit for being.

Sometimes I fear that I am just another clueless bourgeois reformer.


~~~~


Fallout from the cell move has been minimal so far. I am getting the obligatory stink eye from the White Power bloc, and now white guys I don’t even know are giving me the same look, which shows you how fast word spreads inside. I can see them whispering to each other. My only question is, how concerned do I need to be about what they are saying?


~~~~


When I was struggling to finally kick my addiction, around the time I was thirty or thirty-one, I decided to study martial arts because I thought it would be the sort of discipline that would be strong enough to withstand the onslaught of the cocaine craving. I was right, to some degree. It certainly was strong enough in the sense that it substituted one adrenal purge for another.

I quickly became a fairly competent fighter, and instead of craving cocaine, I craved sparring. But no sooner had I begun amateur competition when I effectively destroyed my right shoulder fighting someone significantly larger than me.

Malcolm X tells the story of how he started boxing when he was young, and found that he was pretty good at it until he fought “this big White boy” who whupped his ass. He wrote, “that was the beginning of the end of my fight career. A lot of times in these later years I’ve thought back to that fight and reflected that it was Allah’s work to stop me. I might have ended up punchy.”

Like Malcolm X, a Divine force stepped in to change the course of my fighting life as well. As I mentioned, I was in the first year of my recovery from cocaine, and one night I got drunk and got that intense, overwhelming craving that any former coke addict can tell you about. It’s one of the wildest phenomena of the addiction, the actual measurable biochemical process the body begins when it wants the drug. Adrenaline courses through the system, acid bubbles in the stomach and the bowels turn to mush. At that moment you feel you’ll go out of your mind if you don’t feed that need.

I couldn’t take it anymore so I hopped in my car and drove to the spot in the projects that I had been hitting for years. A few gang kids who I owed money to and had been ducking for months before I got clean, spotted me as I was going into the complex. They found me and dragged me outside, beating and kicking me the entire way.

What happened next is etched so crystal clear in my memory that I will carry each second of it with me for the rest of my life. I was being restrained by one of the four, who had one hand on my left arm, and one on my neck, pushing my head down against the driver’s side window. The other three were in front of my car, one smashing it with a mop handle, the other two behind him laughing. It was clear they were either going to put me in the hospital, or kill me, but either way, I was in some serious, serious shit.  I was most definitely in fear for my life.

Time then slowed to a crawl, and all sound seemed to fade.

In those days while studying martial arts, we learned what was called a “blended street style,” and I—more out of machismo than pragmatism—always carried a knife, which I clipped on the inside of my right front pants pocket. I remember looking down and seeing it there, then looking up and seeing that the dude who was holding me was not paying much attention to me as he watched his friend demolish my headlights. I looked down again, then over at his exposed belly, then down at my knife. I slowly grabbed my knife with my free right hand, flipped it open, and before the dude had any clue what was happening, I had buried it into his abdomen and ripped it back out again.

I had always loathed violence, having been the recipient of it at home, in school, and on the street. As a consequence, the very thought of hurting another person made me physically sick, filled me with pity, and has had a permanent pacifying effect.

So you’ll understand when I tell you I can never and will never forget the scream that boy let out when I gutted him like I did. I saw him go bounding away hollering and all of his friends turned and watched him, stunned and unsure what had happened. In that instant of distraction, with crystal clear thinking and what felt like complete control, I jumped in my car, turned on the ignition, threw the car into reverse, and began backing out. The dude with the mop handle came at me and cracked my windshield and smashed the driver’s side window. Another got in front of me, and I clipped him with the car as I drove away.

To this day, even as I write this, the screams of that boy haunt my soul. I intellectually understand it was self-defense, and I know had I not been feverishly studying how to fight, and cultivating the awareness that permitted me to take advantage of that massive adrenaline surge that literally bent time, I might not have walked away in one piece.

It took years for me to begin to process the emotions properly, but the physical effects were immediate, and absolute. God, the Universe, whatever, did not want me to have this power, because mere weeks later I tore my shoulder socket in that match.

I had no health insurance, so over time the damage grew more and more severe with each successive separation and dislocation. By the time I entered prison, some years later, my arm was useless above the elbow, and I was in chronic pain. I had gone from having the confidence that I could defend myself in any situation to the real terror of any sort of confrontation, because I would be fighting as if I had one arm behind my back, and I would invariably lose.

The sudden realization that I was physically handicapped, forced me into a prima facie understanding that I must seek peaceful resolutions to any and all conflict if I had any hope of guaranteeing my own safety and well-being. And because I effectively took violence off the table as even a possible response, almost all my social and political thinking centered on nonviolence as a de facto component to any change strategy.

I know now in my heart that force can never be met with force if what you seek is a situation without violence. Yes, the White Power bloc already jumped me once, and yes they may try and jump me again. But since I chose not to respond in kind, so far I’ve made out ok. I have to believe that holding fast to this will get me through whatever they throw at me.

August 12, 2005

Rules and regs for parole were explained to us today in “Pre-Start.” Of the very long list of things we are no longer legally allowed to do or have, of particular note was the Illinois Gang Omnibus Prevention Bill that prohibits ex-felons from associating with other ex-felons and anyone known to be a gang member. This may seem on its surface to be a no brainer—a law to keep criminals away from other criminals—but the underlying complexities make it a very interesting piece of legislation.

Yashua believes this law was enacted in order to lock up gang members in Federal prison under the auspices of “domestic terrorism.” With deep gravitas he told the young gang members in my group to be prepared for “what’s coming.” It may be just around the corner. The recent media and government propaganda campaigns against increasing gang activity—centered on a purported “supergang” from El Salvador called “M13”—seems to be laying the public relations groundwork for legally classifying street gang violence as “domestic terrorism.” This would mean the end of any form of legal protections for gang members—no lawyers, warrants, courts, due process, habeas corpus, probable cause, appeals, or possibly even release. It would open the doors to mass arrests.

Critics will invariably claim this interpretation is shrill, paranoid and reactive, but we should remember that prior to 9/11 and the passage of the Patriot Act foreign nationals, even if they were accused of terrorism, were entitled to due process. Not any longer in the era of “enemy-combatants,” torture and rendition, and secret prisons.

The “M13” argument bridges the gap between the foreign national or “enemy combatant” and the “domestic terrorist,” as many purported M13 members are also illegal aliens.  As soon as the American public capitulates to treating “M13,” a street gang, like “Al Qaeda,” it’s only a legalistic hop, skip and jump away from extending the definition to indigenous black and Latino street gangs, or any domestic organized crime group or political entity that has an anti-authoritarian or anti-establishment philosophy, like the various ethnic Mafias or the Hell’s Angels, or the Black Bloc, or the ISO, or even the Animal Liberation Front.  This would, in essence, bring the 1996 Domestic Antiterrorism Act and the Patriot Act into full collusion. [1]  It would also go a long way towards wiping out groups who survive on a cash economy.

What the Illinois parolee legislation—and similar legislation in states across the nation—means is that, since ex-convicts tend to cluster in large numbers in impoverished communities, whole communities of people are legally prevented from associating with one another, even amongst members of the same family. When looking at this under the rubric of “terrorism,” it seems utterly ridiculous. Most gang violence is self-contained in that it targets only those in its milieu, not institutions of authority. Tragic victims of crossfire notwithstanding, street gangs tend to avoid anti-state violence unless provoked by the police.

However, if social and economic conditions continue to deteriorate, or the police continue to summarily lock up or gun down innocent people, a critical mass may be reached and these communities may begin to organize themselves for change, like they did in the 1960s and 70s. Most of the major riots of that era were triggered by the violence white police visited on black folk. When viewed within this context, suddenly the potential applications of this parolee legislation become crystal clear: an organized force of millions of disenfranchised ex-felons, unable to find a decent living or redress their government, is something that must give the ruling class nightmares. Thus, managing this unruly criminal underclass is an integral part of our entire social architecture in what Christian Parenti calls the “Age of Crisis.” [2]

In many ways, we can see that the momentum of awareness and change is building, destroying—for better or worse—the mythology surrounding “the criminal.” It is this they fear, because we are not nearly as dangerous as they need us to be to maintain the status quo, but just dangerous enough to know how to fight back if pushed too far. I no longer fear what street gangs can do to me, but I do fear what the government can do.


~~~~


This afternoon I had to give my DNA to the State of Illinois as part of a new law passed in 2004 requiring all convicts to provide samples. Although we were informed by the head of East Moline BCI [3] that compliance is “voluntary,” when I asked what would happen if we refused he said, unequivocally, that failure to comply would result in us being sent to segregation, where they would forcibly draw blood from us, and then we would be shipped to a Max facility, where another charge would be placed on us, and we would get more time. Would someone please show me the “voluntary” part?

I gave my sample. I thought for just a moment about refusing, on principle, but I knew I would lose any moral battle. Right now, the public wants this, or at least they think they do, because they don’t think it will ever apply to them. Yet so many mass-applied social policies start out in the penal system—constant surveillance, restricted movement, forced identity recording, riot control. If the public became aware of that, they’d start seeing themselves as prisoners in their own purportedly free society, and then maybe they’d get around to changing things. But right now, just like with their acceptance of the police state rising all around them, they see having our DNA as a necessary and even desirable security measure.

I’m deeply distressed by this. I am now, truly, a marked man. They had files on me already. After two years with the Green Party and last summer’s festivities in Boston and New York, I’m sure every branch of Federal law enforcement has made space for me somewhere on their hard drives. I have a number—R45067—that’s bad enough. But now they have me. How easy would it be for me to be framed now? How much is what I say and do in the future going to be tempered by the knowledge that the State will, in one regard, always have me under their thumb? I’m not naïve, I know exactly what can and does happen to people who fly too close to the sun. I’ve made myself believe that I’ve dedicated the last few years of my life to “changing the world” (which I am beginning to see may in truth be a massive prolonged and projected psychological crisis, but that’s another story for another day) knowing full well that anyone who really gets close to shaking up the power structure gets it, usually two in the head, or two life sentences locked far away from the rest of humanity, or two IRS audits that wipe you out and land you on a work farm. How bad it gets it depends on how big you are, and how much shaking you can cause.

What really drives my fear about being framed is that people would probably believe it. The Chicago Police could have gotten away with framing me last year had they not gone too far and tried to portray me as (the irony is killing me!) a white supremacist militia type. But how many people would believe that a “large cache of drugs were found in his home/on his person,” enough to get me sent away for a while? I suppose I made that bed for myself, so I should just lie in it. But man, it’s one seriously lumpy-ass mattress.

I have to admit to feeling that—as an activist—I betrayed my fundamental values and blew an opportunity to make a statement by refusing to give my DNA. I had to keep telling myself they already have my blood, it was drawn at least three times since I entered the system. Underneath it I questioned how much I really wanted to be an activist anymore. Could I have withstood a couple years in a Max joint to defend my principles? I don't know. Probably. I rationalize it by reminding myself that I can be a much more effective agent of change out in the world than locked away in a box somewhere.

Knowing that the constitutionality of this law and of the forcible blood-draws were being challenged in the courts did little to assuage the pervasive feeling I had of being violated in a way that the rapes I suffered never made me feel. One thing is for sure: defiance is a lot harder than it seems sometimes when the consequences get dire.

Maybe I am weak.


~~~~


As a postscript to this entry it’s important to note that today marked the first day of the withdrawal of Israeli settlers from the Gaza Strip. All the news coverage is sympathetic to Israel and is acting like this is the worst thing since the Roman mandate sending the Jews into Diaspora. It’s so frustrating. All they can talk about is how awful it is to have to relocate Israeli graves. Never once do they remind the viewer that three million Palestinians had to relocate their very much alive selves when Israel invaded and occupied their land in 1949 and then again in 1967. It’s really shameless. 

~~~~

NEXT WEEK: Chapter Three continues as the heatwave enveloping East Moline grinds activity to a halt, so the author spends his time in the library, studying the radical history of Malcolm X, Mumia Abu Jamal, Aldous Huxley, Emma Goldman and Paige Smith, and begins to learn about the chronic nature of men institutionalized in the prison system.

~~~~

Footnotes:

1. This was written before the introduction of The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Act of 2007 (S.1959 / H.R.1955), a bill which accomplishes precisely the measures described in the above paragraph.
   
2. This idea is discussed in great detail in Parenti’s brilliant and exhaustively researched book, Lockdown America (1999, Verso). It is the single greatest resource available for understanding police and prisons. 
3. BCI in any law enforcement agency is the Bureau of Criminal Information where criminal records, fingerprints, photos, and DNA are kept.
   

Previous Chapters:

• Introduction

• Chapter One, "Dead Time"

• Chapter Two, "Hotel Hell"

• The beginning of Chapter Three, "The Sweet Moline" 

Read them now or visit the Exile Nation home page.

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Exile Nation copyright © 2010 Charles Shaw. "The Sweet Moline" copyright © 2005, 2010 All rights reserved.

Charles Shaw's work has appeared in Alternet,Alternative Press Review, Conscious Choice, Common Ground, Grist,Guerrilla News Network, Huffington Post, In These Times, Newtopia, TheNew York Times, openDemocracy, Planetizen, Punk Planet, RealitySandwich, San Diego Uptown News, Scoop, Shift, Truthout, TheWitness,YES!, and Znet. He was a Contributing Author to the 2008 Shift Report from the Institute for Noetic Sciences, and in Planetizen's Contemporary Debates in Urban Planning (2007, Island Press). In 2009 he was recognized by the San Diego Press Club for excellence in journalism.

Charles is the Director of the Exile Nation Unheard Voices Story Prioject (coming Spring 2010), and Editor of the Dictionary of Ethical Politics, a collaborative project of Resurgence, openDemocracy, and the Tedworth Trust. He is the former Editorial Director of Conscious Enlightenment Publishing (Conscious Choice, Common Ground, Whole Life Times, and Seattle's Conscious Choice), the founder and publisher of Newtopia, former head writer for the nationally syndicated radio show Reality Checks, former Senior Staff Writer for The Next American City, and a Contributing Editor for Worldchanging.