// A Dream of Politics & Morality//

While writing in my journal, before washing up for bed, thoughts of Erich Mancow Muller and his water boarding experience floated into the room from somewhere. My thoughts drifted to POW and the morality of interrogations. Does the potential safety of any number U.S. citizens warrant the cruel and unusual torture of any number of aliens.

I think about the people I love, about them being tortured or even dieing for the greater good. I miss the people I love. I worry about the people I love, and the uncertainty of their futures.

The future is always uncertain, I never could have planned for or guessed how I would be living my life today.

I was think about how I could have easily ended up in a woman’s shelter if it weren’t for the generosity of friends who I have recently learned to appreciate like family. I was thinking about women who run out of options and have to resort to shelters, and it’s sobering.

And then I went to sleep.

I dreamed that I was trapped in a backyard. With a canopy. There was a green vine with fuchsia flowers that slowly grew to engulf the wooden canopy. It was a hot day, but a low foggy haze hung around us. There were maybe four or five of us. All confused and warm and ignorant.

Then its dark. I wake to the sound of women muttering in low, hushed voices. My comatose eyelids drift open and shut. Cement walls and bolted windows. I’m trapped? No. I sit up, broken women in paints of gray stand by the door looking out at something in the hall. Some crossing their arms with fretful brows and others shaking their heads with fearful, or were they sorrowful, expressions? I push through to see what they disapprove of and I fall out into the hallway. I hear the women say behind me, “That’s just too bad,” and “She was a troublemaker anyways.”

There is a tall woman with scorn on her face, walking away from us. She is a member of the staff. I look back and see many women, some children. I realize that I am in a women’s shelter.

The tall woman has a little girl by the arm. The little girl is roughly led and pushed by the tall woman toward an open office door. The girl is expressionless, apathetic to her fate. I run, don’t know why, to catch them. But the tall woman reaches the office before me and slams it shut. The hall is silent.

I wander the empty, melancholy hallway, wondering where the tall woman took the little girl and why the women disapproved. I pass an open door on my right and catch a glimpse of a familiar figure. My eyes snap back to peer inside. Its the little girl. Its a nurse standing over her.

On the door the sign reads “Correction Hall” but I look back into the room and realize that “Correction Hall” is a euphemism for a torture room.

I can see now that the girl is only six or seven years old. She is laying down in a brown, plastic, coffin shaped bath tub. Its filled with water. The nurse is holding her underwater. I walk inside. The little girl is underwater, eyes closed. She holds her breath. She looks so tired, it has been several hours already. The little girl doesn’t fight anymore. Her arms are crossed against her chest as if she’s dead already. She looks so tired of fighting, so she gives in to death. Her face relaxes, air escapes her.

I walk out of the room hot with indignation.

I pound down the hallway, race with thoughts. I’m suddenly lost. I wasn’t paying attention. I see light coming from another open door. I stand in the doorway and find the nurse. She has the girl’s head in her hands. She stares at the face of the dead little girl. She looks mournful, regretful, ashamed of what she had done. She sees me and pushes the rest of the girl’s lifeless body through the table, as if the body could travel through objects, to dispose of the body.

She sheepishly explains to me their policy on behavior. No nonsense. Three strikes and you’re out, you get sent to the “Correction Hall” and you’re tortured to death. She tries to clear her conscience by explaining how the shelter’s budget is meager, and that their facility is being swarmed with admissions, but women get discharged at a much slower rate. She rambles about overcrowding and how she doesn’t want to kill the children but that the facility is over-crowed. That in order to sustain the facility and give some women a chance at recovery, orphaned children without much of a chance are sacrificed. These are just her orders, she’s just a nurse. The nurse reassures me, “If we save the women, they can make more children.”