Greetings to our readers, writers, and broader community of The Beat Within! We’re bringing you another groundbreaking edition of writing by and for incarcerated youth, and we can’t emphasize enough how grateful we are to have you with us. It’s no easy task to put this publication to print every other week, but with the support of our incredible community, we’ve been able to make it happen for three consecutive decades.
We’re bringing Michael Kroll to the pages of our editorial section, who some of you know as “Einstein” and many more of you know as a dedicated workshop facilitator and advocate. Michael Kroll has been with us since the very early days of The Beat Within and he has some thoughts to share about our collective future and the unconditional positive regard that we hold all of our writers with. Welcome, Michael!
Regrets and Second Chances
There’s always a million things on our minds that we could write about. Like, we could write about the special relationship we make with our writers, temporary “guests” of county correctional systems that are often in need of some correcting themselves.
What makes this relationship so special, we think, is the trust that you young writers put in us to listen, to hear, and to keep our judgments to a minimum even when we wonder why you do some of the knuckle headed things you do.
Maybe it’s because we are there, week after week, year after year, letting you put it down, even when what you put down frightens us for your own futures (and sometimes for ours). Maybe it’s because when you share some of your deepest fears and experiences with us, we keep your secrets by camouflaging your identities in Beat nicknames. It’s a tightrope we walk between systems that want to gather evidence of your “crimes” and our writers who want to feel safe to unburden themselves of heavy thoughts and childhood experiences that crush some under their weight and leave all scarred and hurting.
We have walked this tightrope for more nearly thirty years now, and every issue we put out (including the one you now hold in your hands) confirms in our minds and hearts that this is a unique and powerful publication. That the delicate dance we have to do between those imprisoned in these systems for the young, and those with the power to let us in or keep us out, is worth it.
And so, we dance our dance with the certainty that this helps some of you find a voice you didn’t know you had, and in that voice a way to lead yourselves out of the battlefields of our city streets, strewn with land mines to rip you apart, and to become the teachers all of us need.
There are things we could point out in the news that piss us off so much we could lose our voices screaming: the President of the United States, a multiple convicted felon and someone found liable for sexual abuse facing no legal consequences at all, while so many of you are locked up for much, much less. The top law enforcement officer in the country, Attorney General Pam Bondi, insisting the government can exile any non-citizen they choose without hearings or any Due Process of Law (the Fifth Amendment of the US Constitution), and pay another country to imprison the exiles in deplorable conditions that we would not tolerate in our own. The billionaire class, demanding the government cut services for the poor while seeking tax benefits for themselves; the government trying to force schools not to teach the real history of slavery, and to end all programs designed to even the playing field.
The rich and powerful (most of whom got rich and powerful by breaking, or at least bending, the law) are now in control, and yeah, it’s enough to make us wanna holler. But young people, you, are the future, and because of that, you give us hope.
It is you, who have thought about your past actions with regrets. Regrets that you didn’t take advantage of the chances you were given, who give us the most hope. You are the writers who are beginning to see how your past can affect your future, either by predicting it or changing it. You are the writers who give us hope that everyone is capable of change (including us), and that through the mistakes we all make, we either learn something about ourselves or we fall into patterns that doom us to repeat them again and again, often with increasingly negative consequences.
You are the ones who have used the darkness of the past as flashes of light to see a different future, even if those flashes only give you a brief glimpse. You are the ones who are truly courageous, in our eyes, because you face yourselves squarely. Without letting “the system” or the society off the hook for its contributions to your lives and lifestyles, you see something that you want to build on, to strengthen and to move forward.
The past is the past, and no matter how many regrets we have about it, we can’t change it. No one has ever said it better than the poet Omar Khayyam. Nine hundred years ago, he wrote: “The moving finger writes, and, having writ moves on: nor all your piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all your tears wash out a word of it.” We cannot change the past, but we can use it to change ourselves, to illuminate what lies ahead, and to avoid some truly frightening futures.
But our hope for the future must be balanced by our fear for too many of you. It’s fear that is generated by the stories of children shooting real guns at other children with real guns. It is the close calls, the near misses, the shots that left the writer alive to describe it to an apparently uncaring world that scares us.
It scares us because we know what you could become, and we know how many of you will never know what you’re capable of becoming. It scares us because, while so many of you pray to God, you don’t see God in yourselves and in those you call your enemies. It scares us because, when we read The Beat Without (pieces submitted mostly by state and federal prisoners) we weep over the regrets of those who were where you are now but are growing old in prison because they made no changes when they had the chance.
We are scared because we have friends who are now crippled because a bullet hit their spine and left them permanently in a wheelchair for someone else to feed and dress and take to the bathroom. We are afraid that some of you who pour your hearts and souls out to us every week will become nothing more than memories, names in some other young writer’s sad list of RIPs.
We have our own regrets, of course, our own missed second chances, and we have had our share of frightening experiences. But what scares us the most is that you and the world may never benefit from what we see in you because you can’t see it in yourselves.
We don’t know what the future holds, but we promise that this will be a week filled with the hypocrisy of American politics, filled with regrets and second chances and filled with the hopes and aspirations that keep you writing, and keep The Beat Within beating.
-Michael “Einstein” Kroll
Thank you, Michael, for this reminder that every day presents us with the opportunity to choose better for ourselves, our community, and our world. There’s much work to be done on an individual and collective level, and we must support each other in becoming the best versions of ourselves.
We believe in the success and fulfillment of each and every one of the writers featured in The Beat; that journey toward becoming the best versions of ourselves is never easy, but we hope you know that we’re cheering you on every step of the way. The Beat is always here for you, and there’s nowhere else we’d rather be. Take care of yourselves and each other, and we look forward to the next time we meet!