I woke from my restless few hours on the gas station bench and continued onward into the then very early morning, stopping briefly in a local IHOP to rest in its inviting foyer along the way (the manager kicked me out, ironically in short order, with a somewhat rude “If I let you rest here I have to let everyone rest here” – Yes, my Good Man, that is exactly what you should be doing!). Later I make it into the initial outskirts of Philadelphia proper and am almost immediately greeted by the lovely-muraled yet still-foreboding Philadelphia Industrial Correctional Center – reminding me that sweet-talked &/or gas-lit oppression is just as awful as the most colorfully painted homes of imprisonment & injustice …

“Deserve it? I daresay they might. In truth many who live unfettered deserve imprisonment. Just as many who are imprisoned deserve their freedom. Can any of us give them either? Of course not. So do not be so eager to deal out pain in judgment. For even the very wise cannot see all truths.” ~ via J.R.R. Tolkien

“It is better to risk saving a thousand guilty individuals than to condemn a single innocent one … And this is one of the reasons – albeit possibly the least important thereof – why mercy bears richer fruits than punishment … Justice will not be served until those who have committed acts unjust are forgiven by those against whom the same were committed, and justice will not be known until those who are unaffected by injustice are as outraged as those who are … To sin by silence, then, when they should otherwise quite loudly protest, is makes the truest cowards of men. So let us all stand up for all who are oppressed & cruelly punished, and let us do so quite loudly today.” ~ inspired by Voltaire, Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin & Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Filed under: Peace Pilgrimage #02: Walking HOME (2019) by Scaughdt