At Night, the torture comes.

Dear Erin,                                                                4/24/2018

     Sigh! I’m in the hole and I’ve been here since Friday the 13th. I feel horrible. There’s a lump in my chest all the time, like I’m about to cry. But the tears never come. They just sit there; like a diver on a cliff who never jumps. 

     This little cell is like a fitly, bug infested, dump, dark, dark cell in the basement of a Medieval castle. It was built around the time of Alcatraz. So everything has that creepy old haunted house look to it. It feels like one of the insane asylums from a horror movie, all crumbling and lifeless. Except for the evil that still lives here from time gone past, lurking in the dim flicker of listless 40 watt light bulbs. I am alone. Utterly and completely alone. There is not even the voice of a next door prisoner for me to yell to. The isolation presses in from all sides, like the pressure of the deep dark sea where the sun cannot reach. It is the totality of nothingness.

     At night, the torment comes. It rises to the surface quietly, like a German U-boat come up to look at its prey. I sleep. But I dare not rest, lest I be overrun by the thoughts I hold at bay during waking hours: My 10 year old son, gentle and tender hearted, cries himself to sleep because his father, who he loves so much disappeared. My daughter, delightful in every way, is growing up without a father to delight in her. My wife, beautiful and young, traumatized to her core by the detached and indifferent brutality with which the Feds tore her life apart and scattered it to the four winds. My mother and father, growing feeble in their old age, still in shock that their own son, having done no wrong, was fed to the lions of time, as a warning to those who would doubt the divinity of man the the glory of Rome. And yet, like me, they know this nightmare is not a dream. My country, having rejected God and scoffed at the sacredness of life, now measures a human beings value only by his or her usefulness to the state. In every town and city in American court houses and prosecutor offices work shifts, like recycle plants where people the state has no use for are brought to be stripped of their rights and humanity, and melted down into something less than human and more than animal, but with the dignity of neither. I know that my deserted life is but the first drop of rain to be felt from an angry storm of totalitarianism that is building overhead. A storm that will pour out a flood of such startling lawlessness that it will wash away the hopes and dreams and kindness of an entire generation. The People have sown the winds of government worship, now the people shall reap the whirlwind of government prosecution. Burn the oracle, but it will not hold back the flood.

~Schaeffer Cox