ManicDDaily

Butting Up Against "Because"

Today, I had to go back to a neighborhood in which I lived for years, some years ago.  (Important years.)   I tend to really dislike this kind of journey.  In my ManicDDaily way, I often wax glowingly nostalgic about old haunts (from a distance), but succumb to a terrible grimness when I actually have to go back to them.  Such visits makes me revisit every road taken and not taken; also those roads that were somehow (seemingly unfairly) boarded up.    In the ensuing self-castigation and resentment, all past actions  (even those that turned out very well) take on the smudged hue of mistake.

Today, there was a news story that put these kinds of unuseful regrets and resentments into perspective:  this was about a guy, James Fisher, described in an article in the New York Times by Dan Berry. Fisher was held on death row in Oklahoma for approximately 28 years during which the question of his guilt (for first-degree murder) was never truly adjudicated.   After two trials were eventually overturned for for ineffective assistance of counsel, Mr. Fisher, though maintaining his innocence,  instructed a third attorney to seek a plea bargain;  on pleading guilty, he was released on the condition that he leave the State of Oklahoma immediately and never return.

Dan Berry’s article describes Mr. Fisher departure from Oklahoma, traveling, at one point ,with Stanley Washington, an aide from the Equal Justice Initiative, who himself served 16 years for non-violent drug offenses.  Fisher, in the hot winds of Texas, “vented for a while about his banishment from Oklahoma. He asked Mr. Washington why they would do that, but seemed satisfied by Mr. Washington’s answer of: Who cares?”

Maybe not a just answer, but a useful one for moving on.

Why is what’s done done?  Why is what’s past past?  In The Thief of Time, the wonderful writer Terry Pratchett has another great answer to these types of questions:  “as you accumulate years, you will learn that most answers boil down to ‘Because’.”