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| Bank surveillance photo |
Walter Unbehaun has spent nearly all of his adult life behind bars,
so it's not surprising that he faces sentencing Thursday for yet another
crime, a bank robbery last year. His reason for robbing the bank is
surprising, though: He was homesick for prison.
The 74-year-old high-school dropout and part-time
bathtub repairman probably isn't the first long-term convict to find he
prefers being barked at by guards to life on the outside, which has its
own demands. But living alone and feeling unhappy, Unbehaun decided to
change his situation by committing a crime in order to get caught.
The state faces a conundrum: Meting out punishment for what the defendant considers a reward.
As the years roll up, i imagine we all become homesick for parental protection and care. Hence a clinging to one protective ism or another.
ReplyDeleteOr as Ajahn Brahmavamso once said approximately, "We all love our own suffering". Hell, barracks, temples, prisons, hospitals, or even caskets are very truthful places imho. There is suffering in them, and it is precisely because there is suffering that's where the most basic of dharma teaching can be practised too. Of course, even talking about dharma in them is in itself a very strange irony. Practise the basic precepts, and one day simply because there would be impermance that comes along with that suffering, and the fact that this world is in itself with its own set of egolessnesses and muds, after awhile the hell either becomes a heaven, or that one departs from that very hell. Getting out of that hell, the craving of returning where one came from is an amazing sentient desire that I myself am clueless about the more I consider it.
ReplyDeleteSeeing olcharlie here at this blog apart from Genkaku reminds me of how I first met this name a decade ago, so many years passed by and then again wow, a lovely blog and a lovely acquaintance.
When I got used with poverty along the way, I spent a couple of years earning $55k p.a. and while the affluence was wonderful, it made me so sick from affluence that I went back where I came from, being a poor Buddhist follower.
I see my own foolishness, yet unlike a decade ago when I was figuring out how this foolishness could be cured, today I'm just telling myself that either this foolishness is gonna stay with me quite a while with all due respect accorded, or that simply put it's good hearing from two other foolish gentlemen whom I kinda liked before as a youth.
:) Smile just one smile..
I don't know what I don't know, I won't understand what I won't understand..