Did you ever have a pen pal?
My dad signed me up to be a pen pal when I was a kid. I got a guy my age from New Zealand. It was awkward and a little forced. But it was pretty neat at the same time. We sent photos of each other and exchanged a few letters before it died away.
It had something to do with the Olympic Games at the time if I remember correctly, though I don’t recall the details.
What was implanted in me at the time, however, was an appreciation for the power of the pen in writing a person.
I have since then, exchanged hundreds of lengthy hand written letters with a variety of pen pals I’ve had. It was part of the foundation of how I came to be a writer of books and newspaper columns. It was early training in the written word.
That was a habit from a previous era. Before telephones. Before emails. It’s different when you can just pick up the phone. It’s not the same as an email or text. There’s a methodicalness to it and a different level of passion. There’s even a familiarity created in reading the scrawl of another, which other communication cannot provide.
Seldom in the present do we have opportunities to engage in that tradition unless it is forced.
Today, I seek to begin a revival of that tradition, in which thousands of Americans find themselves exchanging emails back and forth with the thousands of political prisoners we have in our American prisons. I especially seek to focus on the January 6 political prisoners, because if what happened to them can happen to them, it can happen to you or to me.
They were regular Americans who showed up at a rally. They got conned into a trap laid by officials within their own government. They have had their lives destroyed or seriously altered as a result. That is never to happen in a free country.
Truthfully, if someone thinks an election has been stolen, they have every right (and dare I say duty) demanding to speak to their representative and communicating that.
The First Amendment documents redressal of grievances as a fundamental right. It was so important that the founders even put it first on the list of ten additions to the US Constitution that we call “The Bill of Rights.”
After January 6, it was too late to redress grievances. As of January 6, those grievances were still timely and able to be redressed. They had every right to be inside the Capitol.
But that is only my opinion and not necessary one even held by many of the J6 prisoners. The more basic fact is that they were conned into walking into the Capitol illegally.
And truthfully, the distinction means little for the purposes of what I am about to say. This is what is meaningful — we currently have political prisoners in jail, who feel removed from the world, want to know what is happening on the outside, want to know they have not been forgotten, and the truth is this: they have largely been forgotten.
As a group, maybe they are part of our collective conscience in some significant way, if such a thing exists, but as individuals many of them really have been forgotten and are left in jail to rot.
I don’t want that. Instead, I want this awful situation to be an opportunity in which communities bond and which new relationships are forged and in which the foundations of the next chapters in American history are laid.
Mighty lions who today live are imprisoned. Other mighty lions who today live are outside walking free. I wish to create a greater opportunity for the two to get to know each other.
For that opportunity, I am going to ask for money for you to be involved. The truth is, you can do all of what I am saying here on your own. You don’t need me. And I encourage you to do it.
I am here, with a team, building something for those who don’t want to figure it out on their own.
If you want to help me make this happen, I am going to ask you to make some kind of a commitment, though, to help me build an organization that can more successfully communicate with and support these political prisoners and can build a sense of community around the government’s illegitimate and unjustified response to January 6.
With a few team members, I am going to build an organization and hopefully a community of sorts for you and for them — a community that will be there for the individual January 6 prisoners until the very last one is released. I hope you will join me in being one of those who will make that happen.
But also, I want to build an organization and community that will support all political prisoners held in American jails and prisons. Though the J6 prisoners are getting attention, it is important to remember political prosecution in the United States did not start with them. These are people who would never have been sentenced in a different political climate, whose sentencing is entirely or largely political, levied upon them by a regime that seeks to control and dishearten.
But that will fail that regime. They will not control nor dishearten. Our responses to their efforts will leave us only more free and only more encouraged.
To help me accomplish this, I would like to ask you to do two things:
1.) signup as a paid subscriber
This will help our team get the ball rolling on this project, and to hopefully add other projects to support political prisoners in the months ahead.
2.) (optional but still helpful) agree to correspond with a January 6 prisoner each month. If you are quick to the process, you can even pick who you would like to choose as your pen pal. Now there are no guarantees you or I will hear back, but the first step is to just send that letter.
I will be sending a monthly letter to each J6 prisoner who we become aware of and my team and I will compile little details of responses for publishing and sharing within the community. We will start with letters, we will building into a newsletter, and we will grow it out even further from there into mutual support and assistance association while prisoner are in jail and after they have left jail.
Again, this is something you can do entirely on your own, and for free. I am doing this because I know some prisoners are not getting letters. Not only are they not getting letters, but they are being forgotten about in other ways. I want that to change. I want that receiving and sending of letters to be systematized and assured. I want that because, I want this to be a moment when the enemy came along to kill, steal, and destroy and instead, the community was able to embrace truth, to embrace one another and to let us come together in one accord and rise up against that adversity.
And a third thing I’m going to ask of you. It’s not a requirement but I will ask. If you have a pen pal in prison, I’m going to ask you to pray for that pen pal. The power of prayer has never ceased to surprise me.
What an important moment this is, if we make it so.
What an important opportunity this is, if we make it so.
We can choose to back down. We can choose to do what is comfortable. We can choose to continue to do more of what has often been done.
We can, alternately, choose a drastic change of pattern and allow ourselves to rise above the adversity that has appeared, to make this difficult time one that we look back on blessed to have been able to be confronted with a burden and to have made the right choices to flourish in our handling of such a moment.
Please join me in that effort. Tuesday, September 5, 2023, I hope to send out our first batch of letters to our first batch of prisoners. Those who join before then will be remembered as our most important founding members of this effort alongside us.
Tap here to join me in that: https://livingheroes.org
Allan Stevo