Tag: RAM

Steve Bloom, a comrade and veteran activist, asked me several questions regarding my contribution to “Look for Me in the Whirlwind.” The questions delve into aspects of our political struggle against oppression back in the 1960s and ‘70s and are still pressing concerns. My story is closer to what untold numbers of highly motivated 1960s and 1970s “revolutionaries” usually don’t write about or discuss nowadays. I believe I have answered comrade Steve Bloom’s questions.

There are hundreds of prisoners who have been falsely validated as members or associates of prison gangs that can viscerally relate to my experience, from living life as an outlaw in society to being prosecuted and convicted to prison, only to be persecuted while in prison, fundamentally for educating oneself by trying to heighten one’s sense of cultural and social awareness.

Prisoners of varying racial and ethnic backgrounds and ideological and political persuasions have forged a united front – best reflected by the Short Corridor Collective confined in Pelican Bay State Prison Security Housing Unit – around common goals and interests of ameliorating the tortuous concrete conditions inherent to long-term solitary confinement.

“If, at 50,000 volts a zap, five officers shoot their tasers at the same time, the subject gets a 250,000-volt output – equal to the electrical charge inside the death penalty chamber,” Mesha Monge-Irizarry, a leading advocate for police accountability, explained.

Free medical, dental and vision care will be offered at a massive health clinic to be held by Remote Area Medical (RAM) April 1-4 at Cal Expo in Sacramento and April 9-12 at the Oakland Coliseum. Healthcare professionals are expected to provide care for an anticipated 1,000 people per day.