Aggrivated Survival

My friend and former flop-house-mate Sarah has raised an interesting issue. I should note that raising issues is Sarah’s stock-and-trade, and part of the reason I’m fond of Sarah.

i work with the chicago books to women in prison project. jack correspondes with a particular woman from the book project (”gina”) doing 15 to life for killing her abuser. the state calls it murder. she calls it aggravated survival. gina is done taking shit.

The bulk of Sarah’s post is about the prision conditions imposed upon Gina as retribution for this act of “aggrivated survival”. I’m interested in such a thing, as legal defense. In some places it is legal to kill in your own self diefense. In all places, we’re told that it is “self-evident” that we have rights, one of which is an inaliable right to life itself. Unfortunately, we’ll ahve to wait until someone has the resources to take an issue of aggrivated survival to the supreme court before we’ll have a nice and solid answer to the question. Its something to think about, anyway.

I’ve been driven to contemplate my own acts of aggrivated survival myself, to be honest. Of course, I suppose I’ve never been abused enough to commit murder, but I’ve been angry enough to imagine it. I have a very active imagination, so that when I’m in line for my medications, and the line takes hours, and the pharmacist is overworked, underpaid and more stressed than I am, I overlook all of that once I finally see the pricetag. Even with the insurance, which enslaves me, my medications are entirely too expensive. Should I throw all of my time and all of my money at what I need to survive? Certainly I should, most every living creature is solely devoted to its own survival, but the asshole buying condoms and dick pills behind me in line — he has never had to spend such a huge percentage of his income on medication. He is in a hurry for me to be out of his way, and the stress builds, perhaps because i need the pills they’re raping me for,. The money I give for them is literally everythign that i have this time. Walking away from the asshole who amazes me to be needing those condoms in the first place, who is glad to finish his impatience, I wonder what would happen to me if I demanded my medicine. Its only my medicine. It isn’t fair that I should have such a raw deal by life. Maybe I would like to be able to afford those dick pills, but I can’t. I never will be able to with the budget I am on, which I understand to be a privelidged one by some standards, by the standards of most of the world’s population, honestly. Would an act of aggrivated survival solve my problem? Can I demand what I need for my own survival? Actually, I can’t, which is depressing, and so I take my pills again.