Word: syed
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...years as a prison chaplain, I have encountered a number of Sy Johnsons who feel they are chronic victims, abused and misused. One of the alienating choices the Sy Johnsons repeatedly make is to sustain themselves with anger, bitterness and inner turmoil. In their distorted view, these intense and destructive emotions are the glue that holds their fragmented lives together. Such individuals are totally threatened, even panicked, at the suggestion of giving up their anger...
Perpetual time-doers like Sy Johnson have created a self-image as a loser. They see themselves as inferior, inept, unworthy and unlovable...
...Sy Jackson from the inside is to agree that, in part, he has been compelled to be someone else. To see him from the outside, from the other end of his cot, is to acknowledge that the man is an explosive, someone to be afraid of. With that view Sy would wholeheartedly sympathize; he is afraid of himself. If the prisons in which he has spent nearly half his life have provided various punishments, they have also given him a context for looking into his own mind. Since what frightens him about his mind was nurtured in prison, the process...
What disturbs anyone looking at Sy, however, is not his differences from the world but his obvious membership in it. In a sense a criminal is merely a man of extremes, someone who robs gas stations rather than the dignity of a colleague, or who terrorizes with a gun rather than a bullying personality, or who murders in fact instead of with gossip. Perhaps this is why Sy feels low, but not ignoble; the laws he breaks are on the books. Yet his internal torment is that of anyone who recognizes his own guilt and self-hate, who sees...
...Sy had a dream while taking a nap the other day. It was about "a big, gigantic bird without feathers, and he came into my cell and got lodged under my cot. And I'm wondering in my dream whether to free this monster or scream for help." The problem struck him funny. He did not recognize the beast. -By Roger Rosenblatt