May 2007 - Posts

Virginia Tech

For those of us that have studied Seth, Elias, Kris, Abraham, et.al., what I am about to say will make sense. For those of you that are not familiar with what these folks/ghosts have to say you may find a part of you, deep inside, that resonates with what follows. Your minds may rebel, for your thinking is heavily influenced by your beliefs, but if you pay close attention you may find a burgeoning nod of agreement somewhere within your being. Mass events, such as the one at Virginia Tech, leave us with questions that are often bigger than the event itself. Many times, if we allow it, we are left with our current beliefs more entrenched than before. Beliefs such as ‘man is inherently tainted’, ‘God works in mysterious ways’, ‘no place is safe’ and ‘Satan has a foothold in the earthly realm’ are but a few. There are two beliefs that I will address here. The first is that we are victims and the second is that something or someone is the cause of our plight. We call it blame and it is tightly linked to our sense of victimization.

By now most of us have seen the video of Cho blaming everyone and every thing for his miserable state of mind. He takes no responsibility for his own life. Blame is an aspect of our larger belief in cause and effect. If you forget my birthday you are the cause of the effect, which is my sadness. If you steal something from me you are the cause of the effect, which is my anger. Cho believes that we are the cause of his effect, which was deep depression, anger and psychosis. We believe that Cho is the cause of our effect, which is grief, sadness and anger. Our belief in cause and effect makes victims out of all of us and creates our deeply entrenched penchant for blaming. It keeps us locked in victimhood and throws us deeply into a defensive mode. We ask; how do we protect ourselves and our children from such madmen? The question itself further deepens our belief that the world is unsafe and that we can at any moment become a victim of it, and so we continue to create what we believe. Is there any way to understand the tragedy at Virginia Tech in a way that can move us away from our rock solid beliefs that we hold as truth and keeps us on the hamster wheel of victimhood and blame? I believe there is.

Mass events are created not to portray man as hapless creatures, no more in control of their lives than a feather tossed by a turbulent sea. They are created to confront us with our beliefs, for how can we accept a belief if we do not recognize it as a belief. Our beliefs represent our truths and often appear as facts. Our beliefs are the films that feed through the projector lens of our perception. Choose a different film and the projector projects a different scene. Looking at mass events or individual events in this manner takes God off our shitlist and reinstates free will to its rightful place of prominence. By noticing What we do rather than Why we do it we can unearth the beliefs that drive our perception and therefore create our reality. God does not operate in mysterious ways. We just don’t know how to drive our own cars. Maybe it’s time we learned how.

So, Cho blames us and we blame him. Sunnis blame Shiites and Shiites blame Sunnis. Arabs blame Jews and Jews blame Arabs. The Middle East blames the West and the West blames the Middle East. The Republicans blame the Democrats and the Democrats blame the Republicans. Sally blames Harry and Harry blames Sally and we are all victims of each other. Or so we believe, and so it is. Does anyone see any history in this type of thinking; in this belief of ours in victimhood, blame, and cause and effect? Does anyone remember what Gandhi created with non-violence? Cho is our creation as much as we are his. I’m going to share with you a portion of chapter 21 of a novel I wrote called The Redemption of Stanley Kronicki Jr. (not yet published).

Let me set the scene. It takes place on death row at the infamous Walls prison in Huntsville, Texas. John Tyson is soon to be executed for the murder of 16 year old Julie Baggins, committed by shotgun blast as he was robbing a convenience store. Hal Berwick is a reporter for the Jersey Journal newspaper and is there to talk to Tyson about his son, Stanley Kronicki Jr. Stanley was horrendously abused by John Tyson and his mother before the state took him away and put him up for adoption. Now, as an adult, Stanley has drifted into his own form of madness and is in the process of being redeemed by his friends. Berwick is at the prison to get Tyson’s story in the hopes that it can in some way help Stanley. The scene is about responsibility for one’s actions, not just Tyson’s, but ours as well. Here we go:

Berwick had to readjust his eyes. The man sitting across from him was barely recognizable as a human being. Berwick’s mind shot back to 1958. He was thirteen and watching an episode of the Twilight Zone, called The Sin Eater. Over time, and one by one, the people of a remote village entered the hut of the sin eater, who would take their sins and their guilt into his own body. Years passed and throughout the episode Rod Serling cleverly kept the sin eater hidden. The more sins he ate the more he moaned and the more terrible his voice became, while the villagers stayed eternally young and healthy. Then at the last moment of the last scene the camera showed Hal Berwick what fifty years of sin eating had wrought on the sin eater. He now sat directly across from Berwick in a small cage just outside Huntsville, Texas.

Time seemed to have sped-up the ageing process for this sin eater, for he looked twenty years older than his actual age. He sat stoically, almost defiantly in his animal cage, his skin blending perfectly with the white of his prison uniform. He had the gray eyes of his son that sat widely apart on a head that looked like a butternut squash set on end. At some point in his troubled life, probably long ago, he had tattooed a blood-red tear drop at the corner of his right eye. It was faded now like the man who bore it. His lips were as thin as razors and scarred as though he had been afflicted with some strange disease that required repeated surgical intervention. Hal Berwick saw the gap in his teeth and the scar on his lip just above it. His forehead looked like it had been plowed by a garden tiller, so deep were its furrows, and his face could have held a cup of water in its lines and creases. Overall, his face gave the impression of an etch-a-sketch randomly scribbled on by a three-year old. Tyson’s hand, yellowed from a lifetime of chain smoking Pal Mall straights, trembled as he hoisted the phone to his ear. It was missing a BB-sized chunk from the lobe.

“I ain’t got much time and I’m tired of livin’,” Tyson said. His voice was sandy and weak. “So let’s git a move on. Take your pictures first.”

Hal Berwick cocked his camera and captured the wizened image of John Tyson from several angles. One of them would find its way to a cabin wall in the New Jersey woods. He sat down on the hard chair and hooked-up his recorder to the phone.

“Now, tell me about my son,” the sin eater commanded. “I treated him worse than my daddy treated me. He tell you that?”

Hal Berwick nodded.

“How’d he turn out?”

They had agreed to give John Tyson something positive to carry to his grave, so Berwick lied.

“That’s good,” the old man sighed. “That’s real good. I was ascared that they might of taken him from his mama and me too late. The woman drunk herself to death. Couldn’t hold her likker like her ole’ man.”

A look of soul searing pain skirted across the moonscape of the sin eater’s face as a foggy memory surfaced then sunk again. “If I had to do it over, I would’ve killed the baby as it was being born, rather than let him live through what I did to ‘im.”

Tyson lifted his eyes to meet the reporter’s. “You tell him his daddy’s sorry.”

“I’ll tell him, Mr. Tyson.”

“You tell ‘im it was nothin’ personal. It was all me. I would’ve done the same to any kid. You know, I remember a time, when the same was bein’ done to me by my daddy, that I swore to the God that had forsaked me that I’d never do the same. Damn! I’m glad this livin’ business is almost over.”

He stopped for a moment as though something had gotten his attention, and went searching in his mind like a man feeling for a hair in his mouth. He knew something was there calling for him to notice it, but he needed to search around a bit to find it. A light went on in some far-off place in John Tyson’s mind and he found the hair.

“I tried to stop druggin’ once. It was right after they took my boy away. But they had no programs like they got now. The urge was too powerful to control without help. After that I just said, ‘fuck it.’ I went hell bent for leather after that. Straight down a dark hole to hell, which is probably where I’m headin’ in a pretty short while.”

Tyson’s mind darted off in another direction like a steel ball in a pinball machine after hitting a bumper. “You know I’m called the geezer here,” he said. “Usually they come here early; nineteen or twenty. Hell, we got a few seventeen. Some of ‘em didn’t even know there was a death penalty, not that it would’ve mattered. I was forty when I was sent to the Walls, then moved here two years ago. They only use the Walls for their killin’ now. They move me there tomorrow. I put you on my list of one. You gonna watch me get killed, Mr. reporter man?”

“Stanley asked me to,” Berwick replied. He knew it was his role to play in the redemption.

“The little girl’s folks will be there. It ain’t gonna be an easy thing to do. For me, I mean. Stupid thing I did, killin’ that girl.” His mind hit a bumper and skirted off to another part of the table.

“I’m glad they got rid of that God damned ‘lectric chair. The bug juice is better than the chair, though, what with all that twitchin’ and the stench of burnt skin an all. The bug juice is a real human way to kill a man.”

“You mean ‘humane’?”

“God damn it!” John Tyson screamed. “I got me twenty-four hours left and you’re givin’ me a fuckin’ grammar lesson. In two days I’ll be planted in Joe Byrd cemetery like a dog’s bone with nothin’ on my marker ‘cept my prison number, and you’re correctin’ how I talk. If’n I said human, I meant human.”

“I’m sorry Mr. Tyson. It’s a bad habit. My mother used to do it to me and I hated it. Strange how we do the things we hate to do.”

“Damn straight.” The pinball passed between the flippers and dropped into the bowels of the machine. John Tyson yawned. “I’m tired now, and want to rest before they take me to G wing. I want to see a friendly face when I die. Don’t let me down now, and tell my boy I always loved him, even if it was in my own twisted way.”

The sin eater hung-up the phone and signaled for CO Tilley. Hal Berwick disconnected the recorder’s earpiece from the phone and watched the old man hobble out of the room and then out of sight.


John Tyson couldn’t figure the purpose of it, them checking on him every fifteen minutes. It pissed him off. He’d been in the death watch cell for three hours and the CO’s notes had him on the toilet twelve times. Tyson thought it was a pretty good joke, and quite clever of him. He was given the privilege of dying in the clothes of his choice and had asked for a gray CO uniform, but was refused. He stuck with basic white. He wanted to die in something familiar. Tilley heard of his request and wished he was back on J wing for one more day, or even ten more minutes. Ten minutes would be all he’d need.

Tyson heard several footsteps approach and knew his time was drawing to a close. A CO opened his cell and four gray clad guards entered his tight little room. One held his death warrant in his hand, while the other three stood him up and fastened a large leather belt around his waist and hitched it under his crotch then cuffed his hands to it. They left his legs unshackled so as not to slow down his march out of Ellis.

The gate separating the Ellis population from death row was closed and the hall, usually ripe with activity, was quiet and empty. Tyson, with his phalanx of CO’s, marched to the prison infirmary, not for a final check of his health, but because it has a back door to a road. The infirmary was empty. At 4:20 PM the back door opens and John Tyson leaves the only real home he has ever known for the Walls in downtown Huntsville, twenty miles away.


The death chamber is the most attractive room John Tyson has been in for twelve years. It is slightly larger than his cell, but not by much, and the curtains in front of the viewing window give it a homey touch. In the center of the room stands the killing table, slightly longer than his bunk, and covered with a soft mattress so that he’ll be comfortable when he dies. Very human, the sin eater thought. Two arm-rests jut out from the table’s sides at an eighty degree angle, so that the whole thing looks a little too much like a cross. There are six leather straps running from the foot of the death bed up to where the arms jut out at the strange eighty degree angle, and each arm rest of the cross has its own strap. A two-way mirror is built into the wall to the left of the killing table so that John Tyson can see his body from the waist down, but cannot see through to his executioners. He had hoped to be able to look them in the eye.

Four guards, two on each side of the table are undoing the tie-down straps as John Tyson is brought toward the table. It was crowded and the mix of body odor and after-shave was beginning to make the geezer sick. Funny, he thought, how a bad smell would upset him more than his impending execution. He realized how tired he was, so very tired.

His last bed was now unencumbered with the leather straps and the pure white of the sheets made him squint as his pupils puckered and shrunk. Two guards moved him to the table and laid him down. John Tyson did not struggle as did so many others. His body embraced the softness of the thin mattress. One by one the straps were secured, a little tighter than need be, he thought. Maybe the guards were nervous, or maybe they thought he’d try to escape. But escape to where. He was so tired.

A somber man in a white lab coat entered the execution chamber with the “works,” as John Tyson thought of them. The man prepared his left arm with an alcohol rub as if preventing infection really mattered at this point. There wasn’t much fat on John Tyson’s body so the somber man’s tapping brought out a vein in no time. He reached for a number 27 IV needle and told the sin eater to prepare for a little prick.

It was a lifelong habit of his to whistle whenever he was afraid, and so he began a tune as the executioner pricked a fat juicy vein. He looked at John Tyson as recognition of the tune registered on his mind. Sympathy for the Devil was not one of his favorites, in fact he hated it. The song was, however, the darling of death row. The sin eater had the kind of mind where the melody stuck like iron shavings to a magnet, but the lyrics sifted through like beach sand through a wide mesh strainer. The low pitched growling whistle assaulted the sanctity of the ritual, and as the somber man connected the ‘works’ to the saline drip, John Tyson sang the only lyrics to the song he knew. All the cops are criminals, and all the sinners saints, followed him out of the room and greeted the warden, whose entrance ended the music.

The warden, a well muscled man in his mid-forties, faced John Tyson and read the legal document that shook in his trembling hand. The curtain was drawn, allowing the witnesses unimpeded sight of the ritual. His words echoed through a small loudspeaker in the witness gallery, the quality of which reminded Hal Berwick of the Bayonne Drive-in. As he listened to the last words John Tyson would hear from another human being, the reporter wondered what comfort the Baggins could draw from such a macabre scene. Having no children of his own he could only speculate about the special kind of love parents describe when talking about their children. The Baggins looked to be about John Tyson’s age, but clearly life had been better to them, although Berwick was certain they would have exchanged their lives for his just to have been able to embrace their daughter one last time before she died. Lorna Baggins was dressed in a black pant-suit, not out of respect for her daughter’s murderer, but as a symbol of abiding grief caused by her loss. She sat stoically in her chair and repeatedly dabbed her running eyes with a soaked tissue, waiting for the act she knew would take her pain away.

The warden finished reading the death warrant then looked at the clock. It was 11:57 PM and Harry Gleason was a punctual man. If the state of Texas decreed death to be administered at exactly 12:00 AM then, by God, he would see to it that it wouldn’t happen at 11:59 or 12:01. Following the rules was what got him to where he was today. Harry Gleason formally asked, according to the ritual rules, for John Tyson’s last words.

John Tyson was never much of a thinking man, choosing rather to spit out whatever was on his mind the instant it appeared. He wanted to say something and hoped the words would surface, as they always had, seemingly from somewhere else. The words came slowly, but they came.

“If ever there was a man more ready to die,” he said. “I ain’t met him.”

He locked eyes with Lorna Baggins. “I’m sorry I took your baby from you and her daddy, and I hope my dyin’ will bring you a measure of peace.”

The sin eater paused for a moment then directed his attention to the remaining members of the witness chamber, three reporters, the prosecutor in his case and Hal Berwick.

“I’m willin’ and I am so very ready to give up my life, not that I have any choice in the matter, but I aint’ the only one responsible for killin’ that innocent little girl. You all got a little piece of the action on that one, even if you ain’t willin’ to look at it. It’s easy for you all to say how nice the world would be if only my neighbor would change, but the world don’t grow a John Tyson in a vacuum. So, the next time you pass-by a man sleepin’ in a cardboard box, or a mother slappin’ her misbehavin’ child in a grocery store aisle, and you do nothin’ about it, I want you to think about ole’ John Tyson. In my uneducated opinion, any place that could grow a man like me ain’t completely innocent of the crimes he commits.”

He paused and looked at his IV. “That’s all I got to say on the matter.”

His head turned slowly to Harry Gleason. “I’m ready warden. Let’s get it done with. I’m real tired.” John Tyson took up the whistling and Hal Berwick sang the words to himself.

Please allow me to introduce myself,
I’m a man of wealth and taste,
I’ve been around for a long, long year,
stole many a man’s soul and faith.
I was around when Jesus Christ
had his moment of doubt and pain.
Made damn sure that Pilot
washed his hands and sealed his fate.
Pleased to meet you,
Hope you guessed my name............

The somber man caught the nod from the warden and released the Sodium Pentothal into the Tygon line, not enough to put John Tyson into a deep sleep, but enough so that he couldn’t respond to what was coming next. It was enough to stop the whistling. Next the executioner walked to his leather case and retrieved a syringe of Mercurium Bromide, sufficient in quantity to take the breath away from a charging Rhino, and injected it into the ten feet of tubing. It slithered snake-like down the tube looking for a meal and found it in John Tyson’s chest. His lungs struggled to breathe, while his brain tried desperately to continue the job it had done faithfully for fifty-three years. An asthmatic wheeze leaked through his scarred lips and his mind battled against the horror of drowning in a sea of oxygen. Next, the executioner retrieved another syringe, similar in appearance to the first two, but marked KCL in bold red letters. It was a liquid expertly designed by a chemical engineer to grip the heart in a steel fist and shut it down. John Tyson’s heart tried heroically to overcome the effects of the powerful invader, but it, too, fell prey to the clear liquid’s dark strength. His heart slowed to the beat of a death dirge while the Sodium Pentothal kept him still, and easier to watch. It was, after all, a human way to do a killing.

I shouted out “who killed the Kennedys?”
When after all, it was you and me.
Pleased to meet you,
Hope you guessed my name.......
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Well, there you have it. We never know each other’s stories, but we can acknowledge them with a smile for everyone, a kind hello and with a projected energy that says, I know you and I appreciate your story. We need to begin creating a world where none of us feel isolated and alone to such a degree they go psychotic and take thirty-two lives. We need not blame ourselves for the world each of us has created, but rather waken to an awareness of what it is we create and what it is trying to tell each of us. The telling will be different for you than it is for me, for we each have our own story and each story intersects every other.
Bill
Posted 04 May 07 09:00 from 21st Century Reality | 1 Comments