Whenever I gaze at the razor wire that surrounds the men's prison at Federal Medical Center Lexington, I recall an experience months ago which helped lead me here.

I had been debating whether to "cross the line" onto Ft. Benning again, knowing it would put me at serious risk for arrest and imprisonment. I felt compelled to reassert my opposition to the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA) which is housed there. But I worried that my likely imprisonment would create hardships for my loved ones, human and non-human alike. So I deliberated at length, weighing one life-affirming value against another, one concession or failing against another. There were no perfect solutions that honored all responsibilities in every moment.

Then one day I found a news item on the Internet which detailed the mobilization of Mexican troops into a village in Chiapas. As the reporter recounted the soldiers unrolling barbed wire around the community to better sequester and control the villagers, I received a vivid image. I saw a 30-something man standing in his simple home, watching the soldiers through his window. I felt his pain and consternation. But his thoughts - facetiously - were my own: "Oh, it's not CONVENIENT to have this happen to me at this time."

The mocking of my subconscious startled me awake, for even my discernment process had become a dreamy exercise in privilege. I was looking and waiting for an optimal moment, a time when I could choose to be a strong advocate for Latin Americans victimized by the SOA, but at minimal expense to myself and my loved ones.

The brief vision asserted the obvious: that the indigenous people of occupied Chiapas - and many other places coveted by U.S. corporations for their resources - have no voice in the militarization of their sacred homelands. Certainly they are not repressed at their convenience! The message was clear: if I was serious about living in solidarity with the poor and effectively protesting the causes of their poverty, then surely I had to relinquish convenience as a condition for my advocacy. Solidarity required that I share the constraints of the poor. And so I crossed.

My gaze now originates from the women's minimum-security facility, called Federal Prison Camp Lexington Atwood, which is adjacent to FMC Lexington. We women are not corralled by the razor wire, as are the men. Yet there is, as my sister inmate Velma has declared, an invisible fence around us. It is no less daun-ting for being immaterial, and squeezes the heart no less.

But ironically, if the gleaming razor wire confines the men, in a certain way it delivers me from the small-ness of this place. For by mirroring for me the occupation of Chiapas, it reminds me why I am here, and so returns me to the outside world. Surely it is a world with greed and repression to squeeze the human heart, but also beauty, compassion, and the determination of many to see real justice in Latin America.

[Margaret Knapke is serving a three month sentence for reentry trespass in November, 1999 at the School of the Americas in Ft. Benning, Georgia. She is due to be released on October 27.]