The cell was essentially like a generous stall in a woman's bathroom. You
know, about five by six feet, something like that. And about a foot and a half
of it was a bench. So, there was a bench where one person could stretch out and
this bench was hard metal. So there was nothing you could sit on. If you're a
skinny person like me, it's really hard to sit on any of this for more than 20
minutes at a time and I wound up standing for most of that 24 hours.
You could lie on the filthy bathroom floor in front of the toilet or you
could lie on the metal bench but there were three of us. So, usually one person
laid down, one person sat or lay on the floor and I mostly stood up.
It was freezing cold. My suit jacket was taken away. I had a tank top and
a pair of slacks on. It was absolutely freezing for 24 hours. It was like being
in cold storage, being treated like raw meat. And there we were using the
toilet, eating two pieces of white bread and a piece of processed cheese. That
was breakfast and dinner. We were eating, toileting, sleeping and sitting, all
in the same five square feet with several other people; having no place to wash
our hands or anything. It was an absolute public health nightmare. It's
certainly a perfect feeding ground for any sort of infectious disease and--
Rob: You're
speaking professionally. You're a physician.
Jill: I'm
a physician. Yeah, it was just an incredible violation of the most basic public
health standards. There often wasn't even toilet paper and you had to ask for
it. The other women in the cell were trying to cover themselves with toilet
paper, because they were just freezing cold and there was nothing to warm up
with and you didn't even have your own clothes to stay warm with. It was like
being in a minor torture chamber. The kind of the thing if you were subjected
to those conditions for much longer, you would begin to have very serious
health problems. And may already if someone walks in with Tuberculosis or the
flu for the matter or even the common cold or chicken pox or Rubella or a whole
variety of infectious diseases where there's not good protection out there. It
could be an extremely dangerous and risky situation.
Rob: Would
you do it again?
Jill: Absolutely.
Yeah, and unfortunately, as we are denied legitimate pathways for addressing
these emergences: the foreclosure emergency, the unemployment, the inadequate
wages, the student debt burden and the climate crises, we are only accelerating
in the wrong direction right now. And it's very important, I think, that we
stand up and we vote with our feet and we vote with our votes and we not bow to
the disinformation campaigns and the propaganda that tells us that, "We better
just be good little boys and girls," and let them call the shots and that
silence is the best political strategy. You know?
This is the time to reject that politics of fear and to recognize the
politics of fear that has told us to be quiet; that we've got to just vote the
lesser evil. That politics of fear has brought us everything we've been afraid
of: the massive bailouts for Wall Street, the expanding wars for oil, the
declining wages for workers, the off shoring of our jobs. This President is
negotiating the latest Free Trade Agreement which is like NAFTA on steroids.
The attack on our civil liberties in which President Obama codified all the
violations of George Bush and then took it further to where he not only can
throw anybody in jail for whatever his pleasure is. He doesn't have to justify
it or even tell anybody; needn't accuse you of a crime or try you before a
jury. He has the power of indefinite detention, including the power of
assassination. It's just staggering how our civil liberties our being stripped
from us. We cannot afford to sit back and let this happen.
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