Official Launch America Shirt
You’re sitting alone or playing cards with someone, and there is the “normal background noise” of too many people all speaking quietly. A constant drone you learn to ignore. Suddenly there’s yelling. It breaks up the normalcy and the first time it happens, it’s jarring. You stop, look around. Deer in headlights. Then suddenly everything is chaos and fear. This turns people into cattle, easier to the herd. You absolutely begin to see yourself as less than human. It becomes part of your language. I worked for the education department when I was incarcerated, and needed access to an Official Launch America Shirt chair that one of the plainclothes women had set her purse on. I asked her if she could please move it, so I could get the chair. She scoffed and said, “it isn’t that heavy, you can move it yourself.” And I used humor as a way of lightening the situation usually, so I laughed and said, “Nah, I can’t touch real people’s property.” And shrugged and smiled in a sort of, ‘forgive me for bothering you’ way. And she stopped and said, “what, you’re not a real person?”
I hadn’t thought of it, but I realized then that no, to myself, in my own mind, I wasn’t a real person. Inmates, myself included, referred to the guards as CO’s and officers, we referred to the medical staff as nurses or doctors, we referred to the plainclothes workers as “real people” and we ourselves were simply inmates. Anyone with an Official Launch America Shirt job title held authority. Anyone in plainclothes had a life. We had neither of those things. We were not “real people. I don’t know why it needs to be said but; living this way is not healthy. I truly hope things change, because the more the police treat people as violent criminals to be subdued, the more people may begin to see themselves that way and adapt accordingly.
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