Pacifist by Donald Wetzel

Author:Donald Wetzel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: RCS Libri/Rizzoli

19

Prison; Rochester:

I trimmed my hair with a safety razor on the morning of the day of my trial.

The trial was a church-like ritual in an empty courtroom, a kind of responsive reading, but with teeth in it. I remember the high ceiling, the faded pale green walls, the indifferent minor officials coming and going throughout the proceedings, like altar boys, and the always-to-me suspect solemnity of cathedral echoes and men dressed in robes. I pleaded nolo contendere—no contest, indeed—and was sentenced to two and a half years.

I had planned to make a statement to the court, but it seemed bootless. Had I tried, most likely I would have botched it. I was nervous; my hands would have shaken. Possibly my head would have shaken.

My aunt had written wanting to know what I considered to be the positive social value of my going to jail. The positive social value, I finally decided, if there was any at all, was statistical. I increased the numerical strength of the absolutist pacifist movement by one.

Hardly worth a speech.

As a matter of fact, looking back, I can’t remember persuading anyone of even the basic reasonableness of the pacifist point of view, unless possibly it was Lepke, and with Lepke it can be argued, one, that he knew he was about to die, and two, that he knew why.

Anyhow, there would have been no one to hear me but a sleepy United States federal judge had I risen to speak, tried to say it, the simple truth, that standing there I quite likely represented—for all my trembling—the sanity and last real hope of the world.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.