No wonder law-breakers recidivate

I've been going to classes on Mindfulness and Self-awareness and have discovered one part of human nature is all about "getting what one wants" - survival yes, all the way up to the American dream - but even more than that. Much more. But when unfortunately some of us are raised without a healthy normal childhood, or without one or both caring parents, or no modicum of prosperity, or with a lack of individualized education and value-based character development, how can anyone be surprised that prison is not a permanent deterrent to criminality?

I was just sittin on my front porch enjoyin my Salem watching the eastern sunrise and listening to the chirps around me and thought (again), How lucky am I? Yet I had a "normal' loving, care-providing childhood and youth and still ended up as a juvenile delinquent, at the wrong places at the wrong times (in other words I was caught), performin willful and wrongful, illegal, acts. So off to jails (twice) for weeks, and inside the 8x8 concrete cell, OH! How I'd do anything to avoid returning to this freedom killin place! Yet I did return. for me, it was not need of money or love or family and friends, it was from boredom and being left to my own devices. And my tan desert boots. Always got into trouble when I wore those suckers!

But imagine when you have little or nothing to sustain you in this life, in this Land of the Free, this amazing country where anyone can supposedly become a millionaire or even President? That helplessness and hopelessness kills the soul and all caring for others. Just kills it. No wonder I hung with some bad people and got into trouble, and always due to my poor choices. Not caring about getting caught and losing my precious "freedom."

Precious freedom when you have a dead soul? Enjoyin' a smoke outside on your front porch becomes a chimera, a mirage. I could enjoy a smoke in "the Yard" just as easily, have a bed and shelter, a book and three squares. And I've tasted solitary confinement although ill at the time, so I know that as well - and still, for all that, if it HADN'T been for my loving wife Janet, and loving family and friends, and a job, I would've done something bad or worse again and ended up staying in jail even longer, and then out and returning, over and over again.

Americans deserve, and many earn, better lives, with a prosperous family, skills and technical training like my shop class in Ewing High in 1967, and later some college education. I was able to start a new path, a new track, to happiness, true contentment and and real freedom from want.

How about you? What turned your psyche and personality toward a good path?

Best, Rod
Copyright 2014 

Surviving Bipolar Disorder in the modern age . . . a journey of Hope for the afflicted.
My poetic memoir Episodes available at www.amazon.com/episodes-rodney-richards/dp/0615914705/   

 

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