Preponderance of Evidence

This is Saturday when for the most part people should be out enjoying the Spring like weather.  Even now it is 50°.  It's also 6:00 AM so more than enough time to get out there and walk some.  Mary and I went to see the movie Arisen yesterday and my summation on the movie is that there is no summation.  You have to determine, as we did, if you want to go see it.  As in the Evanston Theater that I went to, if you are a senior citizen you have to mention it or they will charge you full price.  White hair and a foot long beard to match is no proof of seniorship. 



Life this past week has put me in a reflective state that just possibly with so many different and divergent viewpoints on so many different subjects perhaps we don't get our purpose in life or the other half of that is there is no purpose.  I had a brilliant discussion with a 19 yr. old young woman on the criminal justice system outside at the picnic table this afternoon.  She told me she was a very good cook.  To which I agreed, "You are a very good cook."  To which she said, "that's not what I said, I said I read a very good book."  I say something to the effect that Mary would say I need my hearing checked.  She agreed.  My friend's 'very good book" was an expose on the criminal justice system and it's failing merits in virtually its entirety.  She knows who I am, having been my neighbor at least 17 out of her 19 years of existence.  She seems well versed in her points of contention most of which I agree with.  What to do about them is what everybody running for President is talking about.  One being, do we offer free college programs to educate prisoners and all the benefits that they would produce in less recidivism, less crime, more marketable skills, etc.  versus say my daughter's costly tuition that we paid for her to go to Miami of Ohio.  She not having robbed, stolen or sold dope to get that college education.  Our conversation was interrupted by other facets of life to be continued, much like my long awaited pie she is going to bake me for having quit smoking 18 months ago.



Arisen, is a movie about Jesus Crucifixion through the eyes of a Roman Soldier who witnessed it.  Now he has to reconcile what he saw versus what he is seeing un ravel right before his very eyes.  Even given the premise that he was there it still is a stretch to believe a man you just killed is up and walking around again.  I mean this isn't the age of modern medical miracles.  Now for you and I who weren't there, we too are presented with the same story to believe or not to believe.  Someone called in to WMBI the other day and stated that she, a woman, had been to a bible study the night before and a man said that a person has to read the Bible from beginning to end before they can go to heaven.  What about the thief on the right, or was it the left who Jesus said I tell you from this day forward you will be with me in Paradise.  He, the thief, had no degree from Moody, free tuition or otherwise.

Way to often I am being cajoled (at 71 years old I might add) to believe this, focus on that, Christians should do this, all under the onslaught of verse and scripture. And I'm wondering would it not have been better and easier if I was the thief on the cross and didn't have to earn my way to heaven and it says I can't but everybody else thinks I better.



STRIVING TO BE PERFECT:  No offense intended but Weight Loss proponents are overwhelming in their pronunciations of what we need to do to stay healthy.  They all sound like the Beer Commercial of years gone by MORE TASTE, LESS FILLING.  They throw guilt around like confetti hoping to shame you into submission.  But what about Harper Lee the noted Author who seemingly wrote one book and who I thought had died since she wrote the book in the middle of the Civil War,

What were her eating habits, and how did she raise her kids since she didn't have the benefit of Dr. James Dobson, who finally silenced him by the way.  And then there is my friend Margaret who recently died with no maladies from eating as far as I had heard. 



What I am coming to conclude is that comedians are authorities on what is politically correct and therefore are more in the know of who should be President than anybody else.  The media are mere color commentators like sports announcers at a game who delight in telling you what is happening down on the field while you are glued to the TV and are to ignorant to determine yourself what is happening on the field.  In summation it sounds like it might come down to what I was always told was not how it was, but it sure seems that way. 



MIGHT IS RIGHT or at least the vestige imagine is until someone comes along and strips it out of the hands of the conveyer of modern day truth.  That is why everyone is afraid of Donald Trump, everyone hates him, hates what he stands for hates what he says he is going to do, hates how he is going about it. everyone that is except the Majority.  And in this game majority wins.  So all that to say there are no rules.  They change the rules all the time to fit their hand and unless you are a major player in the game you have to sit on the sideline and watch. 

Profile of John Thomson

8/12/05

 

PROFILE

 

John Thomson likes to sum up his early life by saying that he spent 17 and one-half years in                  12  different prisons in seven different states.
He often repeats the story of the time a judge told him there was no

reasonable probability that he would ever live freely without violating the

law.

Just as lucidly he

can pinpoint when he first made the decision to defy the judge’s prediction and

change from his criminal lifestyle.

It is clear from

the way anecdotes come rolling so easily from Thomson’s lips, as if they were

legends told to school-children, that he has told his story many times. 

Thomson is now

drawing from his experiences to spearhead an effort in Evanston

to bring attention to offenders who are reentering Illinois communities at record rates: 30,000

to 40,000 are expected to leave prison this year.  When Gov. Rod Blagojevich created a statewide

taskforce in January to study how to support returning offenders and decrease

repeat offenders, which included holding public hearings in Illinois

communities, Thomson made sure one was held in Evanston.

Thomson, 60, with

a deep baritone voice, is making sure the issues stay at the forefront in Evanston by creating a

committee of leaders in the social services community.  They had their first meeting on Wednesday

night.

“Five years ago,

reentry of prisoners was not on anyone’s radar screen as an important issue,”

Thomson said, whose last stint in the penitentiary was 27 years ago for an

armed bank robbery.  “Not until various

states looked at stats, did they realize so many prisoners are coming back and

we have nothing for them [in the way of services].”

About 55 percent

of Illinois

prisoners released each year are back in prison within three years, according

to the taskforce mission statement.
According to Thomson, there are approximately 104 people living in Evanston on parole.

”Even if we only

do have 100 people on parole, those are 100 people that need services,” Thomson

said. 

It’s hard to

imagine that this affable father of three spent his formative years in prison.

But Thomson, who

was born on the south side of Chicago

in 1944, suffered an unstable childhood—an abusive father and an indifferent

mother—and stole his first car by the age of 13.  By the time he was 19, he had been through several

juvenile detention facilities.  After

stealing a car and driving it across state lines at 20 years-old, he was sent

to a string of prisons including the federal penitentiary in Marion, Illinois.

“I didn’t care,”

Thomson said.  “I wasn’t thinking about

getting out.  No one was missing me out

there and I wasn’t missing anyone.  This

was my life.”

Thomson describes

the need to live in a constant “angry state,” in order to remain on guard and

survive in prison.  Charlotte Oda, who

has known Thomson since he joined the Reba

Place Church

in Evanston 27 years ago, recalls a time when he

first moved to Evanston.  When a friend’s child woke Thomson up from a

nap, he reacted like a fellow-prisoner was awakening him up with a knife to the

throat.

“He almost attacked

the child,” Oda said.  “He wasn’t used to

having friendly things happen.  With

everything he was a little on edge.”

Although this is

the first time he’s become so involved in prison reform, it’s not the first

time he’s taken a stab at public service.
In 1993, he ran for Evanston City Council and lost.  Thomson is open with his life story, but

still wary of how he is portrayed by the media.
He said while running for alderman, both the Chicago Tribune and the

Sun-Times wrote articles as if he’d “robbed banks last week.”

Thomson’s “life

change,” as he calls it, began at the age of 26 in 1970 when he was sentenced

to 12 years in prison for robbing a bank in St. Louis

and sent for observation in Springfield,
Missouri.

“I had resigned

myself to the fact that I’m going to live the rest of my life in prison,”

Thomson said.  “I’d given up the

fight.  Twenty-six is young to give up on

life.”

He credits

“accepting Jesus Christ” as the way he turned his life around.  His interest in religion was piqued after

meeting Mary Thomson in 1970, who was working as a teacher and at the prison’s

chapel.  They got married in 1980 after

Thomson was released and the two are now active members of the Reba Place
Church.

In the first

encounters with him, Mary Thomson says John was “not the chatty sort.” 

“He kept to

himself,” she said.  “He was stony-faced;

didn’t smile.  He didn’t interact

socially.” 

Now, John Thomson

describes himself as a “people person” and says he didn’t stick with his work

as a bookkeeper at Northwestern
University, a job he held

for three years following prison, because it was too solitary.  Since prison, Thomson has worked at a number

of jobs but considers himself a house-painter by trade. 

He credits prison

with giving him a high school diploma, some college courses, and teaching him

marketable skills like bookkeeping, and is concerned that these programs are no

longer available for prisoners.

This is just one

of the issues he hopes to address through the committee, which on Wednesday discussed

the possibility of becoming a City Council subcommittee if there is enough

interest.

“I was the energy

behind the hearing,” Thomson said.  “I

knew if we didn’t pull together an advisory committee, the momentum would have

stopped right there.”

Thomson said that

he never before got involved in prison reform issues because he wanted to

protect his children, all of whom attended high school in Evanston.
But a near-fatal heart attack three months ago made him realize that he

“needed to do something” to impact the community.

When asked how her

husband portrayed his stormy past to his children, Mary Thomson said that

John’s story has become so “interwoven in church as story of redemption, that

it was never hidden.”

Now, the Thomson’s

have a new story to add to their cannon of tales: How John Thomson began

advocating for prison reform issues.