Engaging Voices: Tales of Morality and Meaning in an Age of Global Warming

1. Why Am I Alive?

13 “Why are you alive? Why are you alive?” The strange phrase kept repeating itself in Kate’s head, and she had a hard time getting her mind around it. What kind of a question was this? But it was, after all, what she was supposed to ask them. “Remember,” her brother Ned had told her, “these are not your ordinary students. There are murderers, rapists, people inside for political violence or massive white-collar fraud that cost thousands of people their pensions. They are angry, bitter, well defended. You’ve got to hit them right between the eyes with simple, hard questions, or they will just stare at you.” Ned spoke from experience, she knew. He had been teaching this philosophy course at Smithfield Maximum-Security Prison for over a year. But he had hurt his back, pretty badly this time (“Pushing too hard in yoga class,” he laughed, and then grunted with pain as the chortles brought on a spasm in his left hip) and had begged her to take his place for today’s sessions. 1 Why Am I Alive? 14 * Engaging Voices “Most people don’t like to think about these questions, and if I let one class go, they might not come to the next one. They would just go back to being in prison, without thinking about why they are there or what it means.” Kate wasn’t altogether sure it was better to think about it. If they’d still be in jail no matter what they thought, what difference did it make? “All the difference in the world,” Ned had replied, a little impatiently . “It’s all about what it means. Is it a prison? Is it a kind of monastery? Is it a punishment for your moral failings and a chance to make amends, or the effect of a racist justice system in a racist society? What you think determines how you feel, how you survive , what you can hope for. If they are going to move on from being thieves, drug dealers, or murderers, they have to develop some awareness. And then The Movement will really need them. What they’ve been though and how they’ve changed could teach us all a lot.” He had spoken with such force that Kate knew he really needed to believe it—that doing this sort of thing, after all, was why he thought he was alive. He was her fundamentally decent but usually self-preoccupied older brother, who always had one politically correct cause or another at the forefront of his mind—health care reform, end the war (whichever war it was), or raise the minimum wage. For the last two years it had been the fate of prisoners in what he called, scathingly, the “prison-industrial complex,” referring to the joint effort of law enforcement, prison operators, and surveillance technology producers to manage, and at times exploit the labor of, mostly nonwhite American citizens for upwards of a hundred billion dollars a year. Ned didn’t handle disagreement too well, and certainly not from the younger sister he loved dearly but to whom he still needed to condescend. So Kate didn’t tell him that she suspected doing philosophy in a prison—or maybe anywhere else—was just a way to pass the time. People, she felt, did what they wanted and looked for justifications later. If they wanted to be kind, they would choose a kind philosophy ; if they thought their wives should serve them, they would find Why Am I Alive? * 15 a handy patriarchal religion to tell them this was what the Father (or Allah, or Adonai) had in mind. Kate trusted her intuitions, her gut feelings, more than she trusted Ned’s endless political rants. She could sense what was going on, and didn’t need philosophy, which just covered up people’s fear and greed. But here she was, settling into a hard wooden chair outside the Warden’s office, holding tight to her oversized REI bag and hoping the thin cardboard container inside wouldn’t spill, about to lead a philosophy discussion in a prison. “Warden likes to talk to everyone who comes in here,” the massive prison guard had said, looking her over appreciatively. It probably wasn’t too often that they got a visit from a nice-looking young woman, and Kate sensed this guy, whom she dubbed “Big Guard” in...