Aside

     I keep bringin' up From Here to Eternity in this blog. There at the stockade, it was an even bigger deal.  The movie all but ignored the quarter of the novel set in the stockade. Didn't bring up Prewitt spendin' time there. Didn't mention Maggio escapin'. Didn't dwell on all the sadistic beatings given by Fatso Judson. Most of all, didn't bring up Jack Malloy.
     Malloy was a long time prisoner. A bucker of the tide. He'd been a Wobbly like my old man, an organizer and, in the stockade he was the rock that Fatso had to keep bangin' his head against. The stockade was an entire section of the novel. A major moment where Prewitt found the hardheads, the freedom seekers, the free thinkers, the total idiots. Some smart, some dumb as the rocks they broke with sledge hammers.
     The movie, like the novel, was made in the '50s. McCarthy, Red Menace, Cold War. Yup, when it came to discussin' human rights the times sucked. And there I sat in '69 and '70 in the guard shack by the front gate. And aware as could be that most of the men on the inside didn't belong there. Bad luck that they couldn't or didn't want to avoid the draft. Bad luck that they'd gone to Vietnam. Bad luck that they'd been caught with an illegal substance while in uniform. Yeah, they were screw ups or they wouldn't have been on the inside.
     Can't say that the above has any meaning at all. But, one way or the other, that's the way a part of life was back then. Still is today. Shit happens, maybe randomly, maybe not. You give it your best shot and hope the cards line up right. Some people end up in the stockade, some as the man who puts them there. In the long run, most often there's not a lot of difference between the two.
     I was lucky or I wouldn't be sittin' here peckin' away at a laptop. For every one of me there's a dozen people in Bangladesh lookin' for a meal. Or standin' on the corner of 46th and Hiawatha holdin' a cardboard sign with the hopes of scorin' a buck from a passing car.
     The world's a strange place filled with strange people. Hope you can figure it out 'cause I sure can't.