DARING TO DREAM

Martin Luther Kin Jr's assassination occured exactly thirty six years to the day I found San Quentin State Prison. Not until 1985 did the United States offcially observe his accomplishments, establishing a day to commemorate, a day in mid January, chosen in lieu of the date of his death. It must pain societies' brains to be so incredibly careless.

That very same carelessness regularly results in judicial fallibility -- no judge or jury gets it right 100% of the time.

Death Row regardless of your strength, inevitably seeks to dismantle your spirit, the very essense of your psychologocal and emotional being.

Left starving for intellectual stimulation, intimate relationships with family and friends, go astray and vanish.

Someone onc etold me, "never interfere with what you don't understand. "At the lowest point of my existance, I now appreciate the phrase, "time makes things worse not better".

With no-one to move the chess pieces in my life, I have painstakingly exhausted my canvass for companionship.

People often say that you never remember an entire dream, muchless, what it might've represented. Allow me to share a recent dream i not only vividly recall, but confess to embracing.

Strapped to a gurney in a radiant white room, a long curtain hangs at the end of my feet, itching to reveal a few ambivalent faces, people I had known amid my short life-- time-worn folks with antsy foresight weighing in their eyes.

Lethal cocktails on standby, a prison nurse readies needles and monitors my heartrate. My time was here and I was eager to get on with it. California's appeal process has earned the distinction of intentionally prolonging the inevitable, even for those willing to volunteer for an execution date.

Nearly three decades have passed, and finally, a menacing man's voice asks, "Michael, do you have any final words for the people of this great state before your sentence is carried out? "Indeed I do."

"People, imagine your entire life bieng about the worst thing you've ever been accused of. Throughout the course of history, despite being prompted by skpticism, bureaucracies milk their political cash cows, feigning approbation of the death penalty -- intent to mislead the people with, "crime isn't dictated by hopelessness, ignorance, racism, or poverty."

Today I lay before familiar strangers, the spirit of my foolish deeds haunt me -- stumbling back and forth between abject failure and humiliation. With little respect or patience for authority, I can't in all good conscience yawn at creation and thrill at destruction. I'll leave the idyllic immorality to your government.

What occurs to me ladies and gentlemen, is that we live and die in the shining lights of this troubled world. Even if acting out of some bizarre sense of necessity, state-sanctioned revenge is an unfulfilled consuming act of ruinous passion, something far outside the scope of "Justice Being God's Problem."

Whatever punishment you think I may deserve, I swear that I have narrowly endured it. Pinnacles of societal evolution must unearth the courage to overcome barbaric ad reprehensible statutory mandates favored by our nefarious criminal "just-us" system -- left again to marvel at the depths of humanity with messages of mercy, tolerence, forgiveness, and love.

This great nation must carve global paths of undrstanding, exhibiting power in our examples, rather than exmaples of our power.

There is nothing any of us can do that God himself will not forgive. So with my last ensuing breath, -- let me die so you may live"

Michael Flinner
P o Box ~ V-30064
San Quentin
California
94964-0001 USA