Public Hostage: Public Ransom – Inside Institutional America

Chapter Seventeen: Living Death… Alone

All that is necessary to kill life is to deny growth; to deny a future; to relegate life to a perpetual, monotonous, suffocating, repetitive present. Life energy, struggle to grow and change is the most powerful force we know. To stifle that force takes incredible and constant repression.

Global denial of life exists in the institutions. It is so all-pervasive and essentially uniform that, to the casual observer, it may be altogether unapparent. People who come from the outside to see the institution would walk about and invariably be unable to bring themselves to see the evidence before their eyes.

"Why the looks of lifelessness, hopelessness, despair, emptiness? It must be mental retardation," that's why these people are here in the first place! No!  Not true.

"How filthy. What an odor. How deafening the echoing noise." The "things" of the institution—the lesser crimes, the objects that we respond to—dodge the central reality.

Child behind fence
Child alone
Child curled up in bare floor

What the visitor cannot log is the state of the hostages, the death of the spirit—each in his or her own decline…

This is not mental retardation.

This is not emotional disorder.

This is not developmental disability.

This is not illness, God's will, or any other trumped-up etiology.

This is a phase of extermination, PUBLIC EXTERMINATION of the unwanted, the devalued, the powerless: the institutionalized of our country.

Resident alone on bench by window
Row of wheel beds
child in wheel chair

There, to a greater or lesser extent, children and adults are marked for death by the systematic denial of their lives and innate capacity to grow and change. Some go quicker than others; most live on, mimicking life for decades.

Here is the most outrageous of all the crimes of the institution; the crime against humanity.

Child curled up behind bars
Children
Isolated resident