To protest or not?

My best friend is in prison. It's not the first time I've communicated with someone in prison, but it is the first time I have had open and honest, raw communication with someone in prison. My friend is an incredibly intelligent and loving individual. He is my soul friend and I often feel that we are in this together. He's doing the hard part of course, but I am experiencing some things that test me and my sense of what this world is.

What do I do when I hear his stories? How this person who has never physically harmed another being spends huge amounts of time shackled at the feet and hands, sometimes waist? How because he was caught smoking a cigarette when he shouldn't have been has been on 'lock-down' meaning that he is in a cell 23 hours a day, 24 on weekends? How he went for 3 months without seeing daylight, not even through a window? How he was doing fine in his solitary confinement, using the time to meditate, practice Tai Chi and study, but now is struggling after a week of having to share this cell with another man 'on punishment' who talks all day long about violent acts he has committed and that he'd like to commit and who spends a lot of time screaming at the gate? About the fellow inmate, a 20 something year old man who threw piss out of his cell at a passing guard - 6 armed guards with cattle prods came to get him and take him to 'the hole', a cold cell with no light, where you are not allowed to wear clothes and your food gets brought to you only once a day, all meals pureed up together? How the guards belittle and humiliate at any opportunity?

When I was able to go visit, all I saw in prison were a lot of scared and hurting people. That includes the guards. Pain, trauma and hurt, cycles of injustice. Where is the love?

When I hear the stories and think of what my friend and the other inmates are living through I feel sick and disgusted. Like most of us do when we hear stories of injustice, inequality, torture and humiliation inflicted by humans on other humans (and non-humans too). And here lies my challenge - to work out what it is that I am supposed to do.

I have always been in awe of and inspired by activists, demonstrators and reformers. Yet I never felt called to do it myself. Over the years I have beaten myself up about it, wondering perhaps if I am lazy, stupid or other for not getting up and making a scene.

I got off the phone with my friend today and felt disgusted by 'humanity', by how nastily distorted this world has become. What is it all about? It's not right to escape it, but what the fuck are we supposed to do to make it better? And today, for the first time I made peace with that part of me that wanted to feel inadequate for not making a big scene. I realised that my reality is something different, and that's OK. It's OK if I allow someone else to do that good work to change the way things are in the bigger picture. Because, quite honestly, if I were to get involved at that level I'd allow myself to lose myself in craziness about it. I would get bogged down and sick with it all. I figure I'm no use that way. I'm more useful being there for those people I come across in life that need my acceptance and love. Because if we all could be that to everyone we came across there might not be a problem.