Oso Blanco’s birthday is February 26th. Send him a note and check out his birthday statement below. Also, check out his birthday raffle at https://www.abcf.net/blog/oso-blanco-birthday-raffle-is-on/
Byron Chubbuck #07909051
USP Atwater
PO Box 019001
Atwater, CA 95301
Brothers and Sisters and Everyone in the Struggle:
I am now about to turn 59 years of age, and this will be my 26th birthday serving time on this case in federal prison. It is often very empty and cold on birthdays and holidays, because you’re obviously far away from your family. But when people reach out, when brothers and sisters in the struggle reach out and write to a political prisoner on their birthday, it is amazingly powerful. But when you share something that sounds like it was written according to a format, or like it comes from a robot, it is disheartening. Because I often receive birthday greetings from people where it sounds like there is no real heart to the message. I’m a human being, and I like people to express human love from the heart. When they write they should write something from the heart—because I can tell the difference, and I don’t feel any human interaction because they don’t express real human emotions. It is often the same thing—the same words—over, and over, and over, for years.
If you’re reaching out to me on my birthday, you should express real thoughts. Don’t go by a format, a set of words, that someone told you to say. I want you to express your real hearts because I put in my work for the struggle, for the Native-American struggle, for the Zapatista struggle—and I want you to express your real selves, your real heart, your real emotions.
I am far away from my family, and the letter will come a month after February because the police won’t let me have my mail, and they will hold it for at least that long. People must express themselves more genuinely, more from the heart, because you’re talking to a person that is suffering because they’re missing their birthdays with their family, because they’re missing their birthdays with their friends, missing their birthdays with their community. You’re talking to a person who is excluded and exiled from society and all human connection.
When you reach out to a political prisoner and it’s their birthday, it’s really meaningful. I still get birthday greetings from my homeboys in the streets in Albuquerque sometimes, but Fentanyl killed 100 people that I knew in New Mexico, and that’s a real number. And that almost ended the greeting cards coming from people I knew from the streets. My parents are too old. I get some birthday greetings from my Cherokee sister’s side of the family in Oklahoma, on the reservation in Tahlequah. When you’re reaching out to a political prisoner, don’t sound like a robot. Sound like a real human being with real emotions and real love. Because I can tell the difference as time goes on. And I would venture to say society is really messing up the human-emotion-connection for things as important happy birthdays.
When someone that reaches out to you for you birthday, something that is so deep and meaningful when you’re in prison doing a zillion years for your political actions, it is very powerful. So, let’s keep the human connection going for political prisoners because they’re in here for you. They’re in here for people who want a better world. They’re in here for people who know we have to heal the Earth. And they’re in here for the struggle to uplift love. Because without love there will be no change, there will be no better world, there will be no revolution—not without love.
If I have a birthday wish, I wish that people would get up off their asses and really do something to end oppression. Really organize. Really bring oppression, and repression, and abuse by the State to an end. That is my birthday wish.
I love you all, and I thank you so much. Anyone who picks up a pen or types up a letter, I love you so much. I could never have survived these 26 years alone. I never could have survived these years without people like Leonard Peltier, Tom Manning, and Dr. Mutulu Shakur, who I crossed paths with—and not without little things. Not without little things that mean a lot—like birthdays.
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