ZGram - 10/25/2003 - Prisoner of Conscience Letter # 25

[zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org]

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny:  Now more than ever!

October 25, 2003

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

One of the very early "Prisoner of Conscience" letters, dated March 
19, 2003, titled "The Great Pencil Sharpener Crisis This Past Week!":

[START]

Friday afternoon the great pencil sharpener disaster hits.  Now who 
in the real  world out there in freedom would ever think there would 
be a crisis caused by a broken pencil sharpener at the beginning of 
the 21st century in a thoroughly modern place like Canada? 
Unthinkable!  Nonsense!  It just could not happen!  Besides, who the 
hell still uses pencils anyway? 

"Use a ball point pen!" would be the impatient answer by normal 
people with far greater problems to solve in their daily lives or 
busy careers!  And rightly so!

Reality check from Prisoner # 7 in Isolation Unit coming up!

Nice, young, very polite girl guard, always willing to undertake the 
long walk to that mysterious office or place where that, for me, 
enormously important invention of the year 1880 is kept - the pencil 
sharpener of a modern Canadian prison! 

Through the feeding slot she first has to open with an old brass key 
in an 1895 type old, noisy lock in my thick metal cell door, she 
hands me my, by now, pitifully shrunken treasure of dull pencils - 
and with a Bambi-like move and look of her pretty eyes, just visible 
to me as she bends down to talk through my feeding slot, she tells me:

"Sorry, Zündel, the pencil sharpener is not working!"  She hands me 
my fistful of pencils - some colored art pencils made in China of 
utterly inferior, constantly breaking-off tips, Third World quality.

I am on my knees , in order that I can talk through the slot and be 
heard over the prison noise on her side, but she is called away by 
another inmate's furious pounding on the cell door down the hall. 
She flips the thick metal door covering my feeding slot with such a 
loud steel-on-steel bang that every metal steel plate wall of my cell 
bounces the echo around.

Reality begins to sink in as I take a troubled inventory of my 
totally, partially, and not-yet-dull pencils and stubs.  I look at my 
pile of papers in my cell, looking every day more like my legendarily 
messy desk in Tennessee, or earlier in Toronto, as I begin to 
prioritize.  [Who will get a letter] with the remaining supply of 
pencils, and who will have to wait?  From which letters don't I have 
to make painstaking hand-written copies - which ones can I risk to 
send out without copies? 

Weekends are not a good time to get serious repairs done in a jail or 
anywhere else.  But being Ernst, who always had a few dozens, 
hundreds, even thousands of everything in my supply dump, I figure 
I'll keep asking the guards, even the not-so-friendly, tired older 
male ones a few years from retirement, who are just going through the 
bare routine. 

For the next three days, every guard, male or female, old or young, 
at every feeding time, shower or exercise walk in the prison yard is 
asked, begged, pleaded with:  "How about that pencil sharpener 
situation?  Fixed yet?"

"Nope." 

"Any chance for a new one?"

"They are working on it."

I sweeten the offer.  "I'll pay for it - I have money in my account. 
I'll buy it for you, and you'll lend it to me!  I'll sharpen my 
pencils and immediately give it back to you!"

Consternation.  "We can't do that!"

I commiserate with Ingrid, Barb my lady lawyer, Doug Christie in 5000 
km distant Victoria, B.C., my university professor son, Pierre.  He 
tells his sweet wife of the great crisis in his father's life.  She, 
being always the caring, warm, motherly type, takes pity on me and 
dreams about going to the Office Depot and airlifting a gross of 
Pencil sharpeners to her kids' grandfather in distant Toronto, so 
that the little ones can get their frequent missives from Opa Ernst. 
She tells me about that dream, which she fully intended to act on the 
next day - and, though starved of sharp pencils, I have to beseech 
her not to cause me grief with the administration here with that 
pencil sharpener airlift.  They might take it as an affront by that 
impatient, already a bit troublesome houseguest with all that legal 
mail pouring in to the prison censor's already overworked office!

I have an inspiration.  There is one man in this prison who can 
straighten out the pencil sharpener crisis, even though it has not 
even remotely anything to do with his job description.  He is the 
security chief of this entire sprawling prison complex in rural 
Ontario.  I know that he knows that I carry on this correspondence 
with all kinds of lawyers, government officials, reporters, attorneys 
of and for newspapers, ambassadors, government ministers, my sisters, 
my fellow workers, helpers in Tennessee and elsewhere!  I know that 
the chief knows I am using up a lot of pencils because the poor man 
has to read and check the content of all those letters.  During one 
of his official, periodic visits, he told me if I needed something, 
to put in a written request using a Request Form!

I always considered that Request Form as something special, a kind of 
S.O.S. signal that one did not send to the office frivolously.  But 
this Pencil Sharpener Situation, coming at a time when I am getting 
ready for one of the most important judicial type hearings in my 
whole life, gets to me - I simply need a secure supply of sharp 
pencils!  My future life depends on it!

Against the backdrop of this prison experience, I reluctantly put an 
already dull pencil to paper and fill out that S.O.S. Request Form. 
In the last line I add:  "I need help, please.  The pencil sharpener 
has been broken for three days!"  I sign it.  Date it.  I add the 
hour of my request - guessing, because I see no daylight, so I have 
no idea what time it is.  I shove the Request Form under the crack in 
my cell door on the floor, along with an atrociously dull pencil 
letter for Ingrid.

The prison quiets down.  The lights are dimmed  just a bit for the 
night.  I think of Ingrid all alone in Tennessee, as I drift off to 
sleep on my hard prison cot.

Morning comes.  The crack in the door opens.  A food tray is shoved 
in.  I check out which guards are on the shift.  I spot a native 
Indian woman guard and decide she is the motherly, middle-age type. 
I can ask her about the Pencil Sharpener Situation.

Boy, am I wrong in my pick!  She could not care less and walks on. 

Well. 

I know there will be a shift change, and soon new guards will come 
in.  Someone nice, understanding my plight, is bound to appear - and 
there he is, a boyish, lanky, six foot tall fellow in his early 
twenties, a boy who exudes kindness with every boyish grin and 
gesture, not yet deadened by the inanities and insanities of the 
low-lifes he has to deal with most of his waking hours! 

I wait till he serves me my food through the slot and ask. 

He cheerfully replies:  "Get them ready!  I'll look after them for 
you as soon as the feeding rush is over." 

I have a little styrofoam cup where I keep the dull ones.  He sweeps 
them up and rushes off. 

Within less than 15 minutes he is back, an angelic smile on his face. 
He hands me back the tools of my trade, sharpened to the point of a 
needle!  And this is why I can afford to spend two sharpened pencil 
stubs on this story - and still have some pencils left over to write 
to the German Ambassador and the Canadian government!

=====

You see what I mean, Ingrid?  It was a big problem for me.  No 
outsider could imagine the consequences to me, to our life, because 
just then I had to fill in those all-important Appeal Forms and write 
an urgent letter to the Chief of Canada's Refugee and Immigration 
Appeal Board about my case.  Only one kid understood the urgency of 
my situation!

Is it not odd in our [struggle] that there is never anything 
cut-and-dried?  Have you noticed that? Reviewing my life and the list 
of people I have to  interact with in this interdependent, complex 
world, I sit uncomfortably crouched on my spartan prison bed and 
wonder in utter amazement that under the circumstances anything 
actually works! 

Everything we touch or undertake, and almost every one we meet or 
deal with, is in one way or another odd or flawed, hamstrung, 
handicapped with taboos and hang-ups!  It's amazing!  There are 
always can't, don't, mustn't. couldn't for this, that, or another 
dozen reasons.  Why is that?  Is the real world peopled by seven 
billion such creatures?  Is this really the state of the human 
condition?  Is that where we're at in human evolution?  If that's the 
case, then God, please help this planet!

There is no way that such an unstable bunch of bipeds can for long 
hold Spaceship Earth together.  There is no way that this world will 
see marked improvement in many spheres, if this is really where we 
are at in human evolution.

[These people] come in, punch the clock, drink coffee, hold other 
people hostage with asinine conversations, go to lunch, shuffle some 
papers, punch the clock, ask their wife what's for supper, work the 
remote control of the television, eat, have sex, go to sleep, get up 
and steal another day from the good Lord!

[END]