Sean Swain is up for parole this August. His support team has been raising money to pay for legal counsel for this upcoming hearing. Below is an update from Sean. If you’d like to donate to his parole fund, donations are being accepted through CashApp to $swainiac1969.
Every year, once a year – usually around the holidays – I watch the old black-and-white movie, “It’s a Wonderful Life,” with Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed. I sit in my cell crying like a six-year-old with a broken bike.
Don’t judge me.
I think about how the world is, about all the desperate situations confronting all of us, our alienation, the way meaning and purpose are leeched from our lives, disconnected, how we work and die and it just doesn’t matter. In “It’s a Wonderful Life,” everyone rescues Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed in a really touching Cumbayah moment when they are confronted with a desperate situation, the crisis of their lives, and the movie affirms that this giving and caring nature defines us as humans.
That’s not typically how the real world feels like it works… We all know that.
But we’d like to dream that it does.
I’ve been locked up for 3 decades. Yanked out of your world and held, at least ostensibly, where you can’t see me or hear me, where I can’t participate directly in your lives. The goal, for those in control, of course, is to get you to forget about me.
But, last week, at the beginning of June, friends set up a donation fund to raise $3,500 for me to retain legal counsel, Eric Allen, for my next parole hearing. In just 3 days, we raised $2,200 and counting – people sending money to hopefully help me out of this desperate situation, acts of selfless generosity at a time when everyone is wondering how to pay rent, when the traumas of COVID and lockdowns are still very immediate.
I’m reminded of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” when everyone rescues Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed in a really touching Cumbayah moment, and I’m so incredibly grateful, overwhelmed by this, and not just because of the funds and the difference that retaining Eric Allen might have, but I’m also grateful because people everywhere– most of you, I have never even met –have proven that the world IS this way, that WE are this way.
My mom is elderly, and we lost my dad last year. Lauren is holding their breath. The state has shown many times how much it doesn’t like me. Crisis.
And then everybody showed up.
You showed up.
Thank you for that. Thank you.