“diesel therapy”: a lengthy bus trip used as a punishment.
I remember my father’s story. He spent many years in US prisons for drugs and acting out violently against the Vietnam war. But that’s another story.
Regarding this slang term, he never mentioned it to me but his stories clearly reflected the practice.
Guards would chain him face up on the corrugated metal floor of a van with his arms and legs outstretched. Then they would drive for hours on end from one prison facility to another. Sometimes it would be over 12 hours he said.
It wasn’t like he needed to be transferred because often they would just turn around and go back to where they started. And they weren’t tying to get information from him or punish him. They just did this kind of stuff to inmates they didn’t like because they had the power to.
He suffered from migraines anyway, so this torture was beyond painful for him. Early in the trip a migraine would set in and it would just get worse and worse with each rumbling bump in the road.
So now I know what its called: diesel therapy. Another service provided by our tax funded prison system.
It sure taught my dad a lesson! It taught him that authority is corrupt and cruel. It is best to be servile to it, like an abused dog who loves its owner. And it made him angrier. It increased the amount of pain in the world.
He is a great example of how prisons waste money and help nobody (except for the corporations that run them and make huge amounts of tax funded money from them).
My brother Felix runs an orphanage in Cambodia. From the Christian point of view he is definitely a sinner but he’s going to heaven anyway. Directors of Cambodian orphanages go directly to heaven without passing through purgatory.
It is a deal Buddha made with Jesus a long time ago. In return Christian tele evangelists are allowed into heaven as long as at some point in their career they admit to all their decadence and lies in a well promoted teary eyed prime time spectacle.
I think the deal sucks because directors of Cambodian orphanages are truly doing gods work regardless of whether they care less about the Bible. and tele evangelists are idiots.
A child has a heightened ability to take in stimuli but does not yet have the tools to deal with this stimuli.
Children’s’ senses are just as acute as an adult. In some cases their senses are even better, for example most children have better hearing and eyesight than adults.
What they don’t have yet is contextual analysis tools. When they see something they might not have the experience to be able to put the thing in context and analyze it. They have not seen enough violence to know how to process it, for example. An adult has seen so much violence that they can easily put it away in the part of their brain that deals with violence.
That part of the brain has developed the tools to diffuse or otherwise rationalize the violence so that it does not do any great damage to the rest of the body. For example an adult can see a murder in a movie and the mind easily explains that it is just acting and thus we don’t get upset by it.
A child however does not have these tools fully developed yet and the violence has nowhere to go. So it gets dealt with in various ways; it resurfaces later as trauma; it is expressed as violence to others; it does damage to the body via cancer or another stress; or the child actually inflicts violence to their own body.
This is why it is so important to be aware of what a child is exposed to.
But I do not think quarantine is the best route. A child can’t develop the tools unless they are exposed. If you keep a child away from violence their whole childhood, when they go into the world one violent event could destroy them.
They need to be exposed to real life as children, but HOW this is done needs to be considered with great care. I think the parent has to perform an ongoing proactive role as that part of the brain that the child does not yet have developed.
The typical example is the conversation almost every parent has with a child about how movies are just actors and not real. The parent is helping the child process the information, helping the child exercise that part of the brain.
Obviously helping a child develop is a fine line and can easily fall into propaganda and brain control. I strongly think that the child knows better what is good for them than I do. Helping the child develop their brain to deal with elements of life comes from the perspective that the child already has the essence of those tools already.
The adult is only a guide, much like a mountain guide helps climbers up a mountain. Like the guide is the employee hired by the mountain climbers, the parent is there to serve the child in their climb. The child is the boss of their soul. The parent only guides as somebody who is more knowledgeable with the current terrain.
But as the guide, there is tremendous responsibility. The adult must understand that the environment for the child is crystal clear and new. The great tragedy is when the adult fails to realize that even though the child doesn’t yet have the tools to process the environment fully, the child takes it all in with great intensity.
When you talk on the phone with the child in the back seat, when you glance at someone, when you speak in a certain tone of voice, when you say words (every single word): it is all taken in with complete clarity. Never mind that the child appears to not be paying attention. Their ears, their eyes, all of their senses are working perfectly.
The appearance that they are not paying attention is merely because, like all humans, they can multitast and also their mind is not necessarily engaged. But their body is engaged and they take it in and it gets lodged somewhere inside.
That is why a child can come out with something totally surprising. For example my four year old daughter put on a dress the other day and said, “I feel so sexy in this dress.” Nobody ever told her she looked sexy, but she probably picked it up when adults were talking about something else and thought she wasn’t paying attention.
The danger occurs when we loose control and presume that the child isn’t taking it in.
Loretta went to get her first checkup. I had suspected she was pregnant for a while. She showed all the usual signs: nausea on seeing me, bipolar behavior, schizophrenia, and outbursts of rage… ok maybe I’m being a little insensitive.
The doctors confirmed it, with a twist: not only is she pregnant, she has been inseminated by aliens.
But after doing some research apparently they all look like aliens at this stage. I think I can see a tail. I definitely see gills.
And he’s a boy! Look for the arrow: penis.
He’s 16 weeks old, due mid June.
I always knew my first would be a girl and my second a boy. Loretta pointed out that I had a 50% chance of guessing right, but that is irrelevant. I always knew. There are some things you just know.
I think a name can be give or take power from a person. For example, if you called a child “Idiot” as their name it would probably cause problems for them. All names cary some sort of influence for the child.
We got Cazimirs name through a series of steps:
1. Loretta dreamt that his name was “like Kashmir but different”.
2. Loretta’s mother pointed out that the Patron Saint of Lithuania is Casimir (Lithuanian is their heritage).
Once we settled on Casimir we debated whether to spell it with a z or s: Cazimir or Casimir.
Online searches revealed a Polish Church in Baltimore (my mother’s city of birth! Good sign!) called the “Faith Community of St. Casimir”. It is a Catholic Church run by Franciscan Friars, a group of people I like.
The web site has all sorts of cool things like this photo:
I find this man’s face very endearing.
The site also has a lot of cool quotes like this Prayer For Peace by St. Francis of Assisi:
Woa, lighten up, dude. That’s where me and Catholicism part ways. This is not the kind of energy I like. But I love the name. So we decided to spell it “CAZIMIR” with a Z. The Z is our way of giving Cazimir the freedom to be all the good things that history has imbued in his name while making him unique and individual, free to forge his own path as well. Every time I call his name I will have that meaning in the call. Being treated in that way he will know those options. It will influence him. How much only God knows.
Cazimir Constantine Gendville-BrooksChurch was born in the Brooklyn Birthing Center, NY, this morning at 4:44am, July 3rd 2008. There to celebrate his arrival were Gennaro, Loretta (obviously!), Saomi, aunty Hannah and the great birthing center staff.
Loretta was in labor for about a day and a half. The final push was about half an hour. Everything went smoothly.
We chose his name because Loretta had a dream that his name was Cashmir but different. Her mother pointed out that Casimir is the patron saint of Lithuania, their heritage. So we settled on Cazimir because, well, we just liked it. The same goes for Constantine. It is also Loretta’s mother’s name (Constance).
Today we found out that Cazimir means “Peace Maker and Famous Destroyer” according to YeaBaby.com. I like that. Peace Maker. I also like Famous Destroyer. I’m a HUGE fan of another famous destroyer, the Hindu Goddess Kali, who destroys all and everyone. You don’t mess with Kali. There’s nobody better to have on your side than somebody who can obliterate the universe. Because of that she’s popular amongst the Hindus.
Below are photos of the Peace Maker and Famous Destroyer’s first few minutes in this world.
