There’s a famous quote by Nietzsche: Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.
What brought this quote to mind was not something about terrorists or torturers, bombs or war, but two stories I happened to read today about everyday things here at home. One is a story about teenage girls in a small town. The other about a prison artist in solitary confinement.
Meet Helen Brady:
She is just 14 years old. While many other girls her age are filling the chatmosphere with gabby text messages, Helen is practicing arresting illegal immigrants. (Or, in this case, her friend Courtney.)
And Donny Johnson:
His paintbrush, made from plastic wrap, foil and strands of his own hair, lay on the lower bunk. So did his paints, leached from M&Ms and sitting in little white plastic containers that once held packets of grape jelly. Next to them was a stack of the blank postcards that are his canvases.
Helen’s story is told in the LA Weekly’s Girls Gone Border Patrol. Donny’s is described in the New York Times article (via the IHT), M&Ms color a prison artist’s solitary life. Both articles are quite lengthy, but well worth reading in full. Both articles have stuck with me all day. They’re odd stories.
Another day, and what sounds like another arrest on the Arizona border. Naco is a city where “The Border” is no abstraction. It is the painfully real corrugated-steel barrier — rusted in spots, barbed in others — that slices the town neatly in two. One half for the United States, one half for Mexico. In Naco, the border is where illegal immigrants and the Border Patrol come to perform their intricate ballet of catch-and-release.
(…)Helen, along with 20 other teens, is an officially certified Border Patrol Explorer Scout. The 90-day training program, started last year by the Boy Scouts, exposes teens, ages 14 through 17, to a career with the Border Patrol. “It gives you a cool feeling, like you’re a real agent or something,” says Helen.
Border Patrol Captain Terrence Ford started off with the basics of statutory and criminal law. But the fare quickly became more challenging — if not controversial. The teens learn to raid buildings. They learn to pull cars off the road. They learn to shoot guns. They even learn to track “illegal immigrants” — or advisers dressed as illegal immigrants — on moonless nights with night-vision goggles.
This is definitely not your father’s scouting program, but it’s still a huge hit with parents. Enrollment is swelling.
Last Friday night, more than 500 people jammed into a gallery in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, to assess 25 of Donny Johnson’s small, intense works. There was sangria, as well as big bowls of M&Ms. By the end of the evening, six of the postcard paintings had sold, for $500 each.
(…) Most prison art, the kind created in crafts classes and sold in gift shops, tends toward kitsch and caricature. But there are no classes or art supplies where Johnson is held, and his powerful, largely abstract paintings are something different. They reflect the sensory deprivation and diminished depth perception of someone held in a windowless cell for almost two decades.
They pulse, some artists on the outside say, with memory and longing and madness. Others are less impressed, saying the works are interesting examples of human ingenuity but fall short of real artistic achievement.
But it’s the details that get to me.
For teens on the American side of Naco, the border is a means of security — and even a potential career opportunity. But below the line, in Naco, Mexico, the border is the subject of hatred. For Mexican teens developing an identity and a sense of their place in the world, it represents a constant slap in the face — and, in their eyes, the ultimate double standard. It keeps friends and family on opposite sides of the fence from visiting each other, while ensuring that the Mexican half of Naco is forever abloom with border crossers and drug smugglers.
(…)Helen Brady has never ventured south of the border, despite being able to see Mexico from her back yard.
About 3,300 of the state’s most dangerous prisoners are held at Pelican Bay, which is among the toughest prisons in the nation. But even here there are varying levels of security. The problem prisoners, like Johnson, are held in the Security Housing Unit, which everyone calls the SHU.
He lives in an 8-by-12-foot concrete cell. His meals are pushed through a slot in the door. Except for the odd visitor, whom he talks to through thick plexiglass, he interacts with no one. He has not touched another person in 17 years.
I can’t shake the thoughts of Helen and Donny, although they couldn’t be more different. Donny’s a murderer, Helen’s a kid, but they’re both a part of something bigger. They’re connected somehow with something brutal, something monstrous, in the heart of our system. They’re symptoms of some madness we indulge.
We need to stop fighting monsters. Nietzsche’s quote ends with this warning — And if you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.
I imagine the abyss stares out of Donny’s eyes, the eyes of a killer who hasn’t touched another human in 17 years. But I imagine a glint of it in Helen’s eyes as well, and all the other little girls learning to hunt humans.
