Category: Writing

Announcing Layoffs, AI style

gautam Leave a comment

After playing around with OpenAI’s new ChatGPT bot (which is very impressive, highly recommend trying it out) I noticed something…peculiar about its writing style: it’s default writing style felt very sanitized and corporate.

In addition to being a writer, I also work in tech, so I’ve seen many of recent layoff announcements in the industry which inspired the question, “Could an AI write a convincing corporate layoff announcement?”

See this layoff announcement from Amazon and compare it to the AI generated layoff announcement below:

 

Dear Employees,

It is with a heavy heart that we must announce that we will be undergoing layoffs due to overhiring during the pandemic and the uncertain macroeconomic conditions. We understand that this news may be difficult to hear and that it will have a significant impact on those affected by the layoffs, as well as on the entire company.

We want to assure you that this decision was not made lightly and that we have explored every possible alternative. Unfortunately, the current economic climate and the challenges posed by the pandemic have left us with no other option. We are truly sorry for the hardship this will cause and want to let you know that those affected by the layoffs will be given generous severance packages.

We understand that this news may be unsettling and that it may raise questions. We will be holding a virtual town hall meeting later this week to answer any questions and provide more information. In the meantime, please know that we value your contributions to the company and that we will do everything we can to support you during this difficult time.

Sincerely,

[Your Name]

[Company Name]

Time Trouble Misery

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When I was a teenager, I was notorious at the Atlanta Chess Club for getting into time trouble. I’d play a game with 30 minutes per side and struggle to not lose on time, eventually forced to blitz out a flurry of moves without thinking as the final minutes and seconds slipped away on my clock. This same problem persisted at longer time controls too: 45 minutes per side, 60 minutes per side, 90 minutes per side, even three hours per side—I’d still run short on time!

I was paralyzed by indecision. In many games I’d end up in a difficult position where there were several reasonable moves to make, but I couldn’t foresee exactly what would happen if I chose one.  Oftentimes I felt something better would come along if I waited and analyzed the board a bit longer. I’d tell myself that I was doing the right thing by patiently investigating the position more deeply, but more often than not I would spin my wheels retreading the exact same analysis I’d already done. After a certain point, there were rarely any new insights.

In retrospect, I realized this was just a way to defer making a decision since I didn’t have confidence in my ability to make one. As long as I don’t move, I haven’t made the wrong move. As long as I don’t move, I can still find the perfect one.

In the end, I’d burn a bunch of time, panic, and finally throw out a move that was no better in quality than the move I would’ve made if I had spent two minutes thinking instead of twenty. But now I had less time remaining for the rest of the game. In some cases, overthinking led to even worse decisions after I’d start seeing phantom threats and miss obvious ideas due to tunnel vision1.

I only resolved this problem many years after I quit serious competitive chess. Other life circumstances forced me to become comfortable with ambiguity and realizing that:

a) human beings are well designed to adapt to new circumstances and solve new problems and;

b) there’s actually a fun and joy in the unpredictability of the tree of decisions.

Since I can’t avoid the unknown, I’ll instead choose to relish the excitement of what’s out there — it could be bad, it could be good, but either way it’ll be different and an opportunity to solve new problems2.

I’ve also worked on letting go of past states. For example, if I was winning a game and then made a terrible move that brought the position back to equal, I’d get tilted and inevitably make more bad moves and lose. But if I had just been dropped into that position with no prior context of previously being in a winning position, I would’ve been fine; it’s an even game. Nowadays I’ve cultivated an indifference to abrupt changes in game state. If the flow of the game changes, I don’t get upset or thrown off balance. I reorient myself to the current situation: it doesn’t matter where we were, we’re here now and our job is to find the best move.

If you make a decision and commit, don’t you risk the sunk cost fallacy of charging ahead even when the facts and environment change? One subtle and underappreciated characteristic of strong chess players is their ability to adapt. They’ll make moves that improve their positions and proceed with their plans, while maintaining maximal flexibility to pivot to another plan if circumstances on the board suddenly shift.

Similarly, you can optimize for flexibility by creating the maximum number of offramps for each decision. At each offramp, assess the situation as if you were just dropped off at that point with no prior effort or context on what it took to get there; you want to avoid the inertia of automatically continuing down your path.

Right here, right now, does it make sense to take the offramp or stay on the road?

You won’t be able to foresee the consequences of every decision, so enjoy the fun of the unknown instead of haranguing yourself with what-ifs. Whatever you choose will inevitably pose challenges (and good surprises too!), so roll up your sleeves and make the best moves you can instead of mentally teleporting to the counterfactual universe of another choice you could’ve made. Don’t deceive yourself into thinking you can just stand there and endlessly ponder the options. Indecision is still a decision, and all it leads to is time trouble misery.

 

Footnotes

  1. Chess players have an aphorism for this: Thing long, think wrong.
  2. I just returned to serious competitive chess after over a decade away. And while I’m not (yet) as good a player as I used to be, this appreciation for the unknown has already drastically changed the nature of my play — my games are far more creative, dynamic, and exciting than my old games.

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My Experience with Senator-elect Warnock

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I waited until today to post this because I believe democracy was on the ballot in the Georgia Senate runoff races. I wanted Senator-elect Warnock (and Jon Ossoff) to win. Now that he has, I want to share my experience with Senator-elect Warnock from nearly a decade ago.

In 2015, I wrote Remain Free about my friendship with death row inmate Troy Davis. The book covers the events that took place from 2008 – 2012, including Troy’s controversial execution in 2011 despite serious doubts about this guilt. Senator-elect (then, just Reverend Doctor) Raphael Warnock was the eulogist at Troy’s funeral.

Here is the relevant excerpt (for those with the hardcover copy, it’s from pages 269-272 and page 282):

 

         Now it was time for the eulogist, Dr. Raphael Warnock of Ebenezer Baptist Church. The whole church stood as he walked to the pulpit. His shaved head glowed as he smiled, and then he began speaking.

         “I’ve had to preach after many people, but I have never had to preach after the Reverend Doctor Dick Gregory.” The crowd laughed and cheered, and a few waves of applause rolled through the sanctuary.

         “I must acknowledge my mother. I haven’t seen her, but I heard she’s here. Mama, where are you? Where is my mother? Oh, she’s over there! There’s my mother. You come and sit right here.” He motioned to a seat in the front, and a suited man ushered her to the seat. After using his position in the pulpit to secure prime seating for his mother, he began a winding Bible story about the apostles and the death of Jesus. Virginia Davis’s untimely death was because she knew, four months later, her son would be “liberated by death,” and like a good mother she “rushed home to welcome her son.”

[Troy] transformed a prison cell into a pulpit. I don’t have to preach long today, because he’s already preached a sermon, turned death row into a sanctuary, and showed all of us what faith and hope and love look like. And from one of the darkest and murkiest places of human existence, he allowed his light to shine…The difference between us and Troy is that Troy knew it and some of us don’t know it yet. We all live on death row.

Warnock began yelling into the microphone.

We have been dealing with the death of Jesus and the betrayal of Judas. And there are those among us who are the sons and daughters of slaves, who should’ve known better than to turn on Troy! And there are those among us who knew what Billy Holliday meant when she said southern trees bear strange fruit and blood on the leaves, blood on the truth! Betrayed! Sold him out! Those among us who should’ve known better!

My heart beat frantically, the crowd was entranced, and Warnock knew he had us. His bellowing reached a peak as he preached, no, screamed of the Pentacost and how Jesus’ death could have spelled the end of the church.

We are on the brink of a new era…It all could have died right there! But I’m so glad that in those days Peter stood up! That’s what we need! We need in these days for somebody to stand up in this very moment in this very hour in this very city! We need people to stand up for justice! Stand up for truth! Stand up for human dignity! Stand up for human decency! Stand up for our children and for our future! Everybody outta stand up! Peter said loss is but a chapter, it’s not the whole book! Hold on for the whole book!

 

         His yelling blurred and time slowed as if we were in a scene from an Ellison novel. Ras the Exhorter bellowed into the microphone, at this event organized by the Brotherhood, and Troy was the Invisible Man, only he was invisible not because of his race but because his visibility was inconvenient for these ambitious men. Every bellow into the microphone was a destruction of Troy the human and the construction of Troy the saint, Troy the prophet, Troy the ethereal icon who provided the necessary firewood for overzealous pastors and corner speakers.

         And whenever I thought it was over, the Exhorter screamed some more, each platitude whipping the crowd into an even greater frenzy. The men and women in the pews, brought in by the Brotherhood, none of whom ever knew Troy, were at a ceremony that brought them no closer to knowing him, and cheered and applauded and screamed as this preacher erased him with words so loud that the mic distorted them.

What Judas did is characteristic of evil! Evil always goes too far! And because it always goes too far, it contains within itself the seed of its own destruction!…What happened last Wednesday night was a classic move of evil to go too far!…It’s just like evil to press pause just long enough to feel the anguish and the torture!…Evil always goes too far! One Friday evening evil went too far! They nailed him on a cross! They pierced him on the side! They hung him high! They stretched him wide! But they didn’t know that he had said, “if I’ll be lifted up, I’ll draw all men onto me!” Evil always goes toooo farrrrrr!

 

         The crowd stood and cheered. The sanctuary echoed with their thunderous applause. Eventually, after more than half an hour on the pulpit, Ras the Exhorter reverted back to the Reverend Doctor Raphael Gamaliel Warnock.

They ended the funeral with a recording of Troy, as if his voice echoing through the sanctuary was enough to redeem this orgy of blustering preachers and clueless celebrities, all of whom, like the crowd assembled, had joined in on a popular cause to obtain the moral righteousness that came along with the activist label. All desperately hoped Troy’s coattails would be long enough to ride all the way to the top.

         “One group of people I don’t have any respect for are the ministers and pastors who run these mega-churches,” Troy had once said. “They’re preaching about faith and God, but how can they preach that when they’ve got bodyguards, bulletproof vests, and thousand-dollar suits? They don’t have faith in God. They have faith in money.”

         After the closing remarks, pallbearers carried the casket out of the church, and the pews emptied row by row. My small role in the funeral afforded me a front-row seat, so I followed the casket outside before the crowds had assembled. As I walked past Martina, gaunt and wheelchair-bound, I touched her shoulder and whispered, “I’m sorry,” knowing amid the din of the crowd that she couldn’t hear me.

         Outside, Warnock talked to Martina while a photographer, possibly part of Warnock’s entourage, eagerly snapped away. As the casket was loaded into a hearse and the family into another car, I overheard two of the photographers.

         “Man, I’m so sick of being told over and over to take photos of a certain pastor.”

         “They asked you that?”

         “It’s not his funeral. Why should I take so many pictures of him?”

         For most people, that was the end. The crowds dispersed, some of them joining in the protests outside, others going home, and the majority heading to the local longshoremen’s union house for the reception, which promised food for the hungry masses.

         How could Martina have agreed to this? Did she agree to this? Why didn’t she, Troy’s closest confidant and fiercest advocate, speak? Why was Larry the only person from Amnesty International who spoke? 

         In all the flash and opulence, the four speakers who actually knew Troy were overshadowed. They were subdued. Their voices faltered. They spoke of the true Troy Davis. The Troy who spoke so softly that it was difficult to hear him from just a few feet away. The Troy who kept a calendar of his nephew’s tests and friends’ birthdays. The Troy who was more worried about the effect of his impending execution on his family than about dying. The Troy who was more excited about my SAT score than my own family was. The Troy who pulled me aside on death row and told me to be a more supportive brother to my younger sister.

         The funeral wasn’t a remembrance of Troy Davis or the mission he hoped would outlive him, but a tool for a slew of opportunists to bask in the spotlight Troy had created for them, scattered with a few memories from those who actually knew him and a seemingly impromptu speech from just one family member to hint at a fragment of legitimacy. The event was loud, flashy, bombastic, and lacking in substance—in every way, the antithesis of Troy himself. They’d made Troy a caricature, and rather than celebrating his life as the glossy two-dozen page program claimed it would, the funeral merely celebrated his celebrity.

         Georgia executed Troy Davis, the man. And now I had just witnessed Raphael Warnock and the NAACP execute Troy Davis, the human. 

…

After the funeral, I looked up Raphael Warnock. My search took me to the Ebenezer Baptist Church website, where Warnock’s shaved head and smiling face stared down on me on every single webpage. The website has since been updated, replacing the omnipresent Warnock head with a “Warnock Gallery,” featuring the Reverend Doctor in various photos all conveniently available for download along with a Warnock press kit. I also found a Wikipedia user named “revdocta,” created a few days before the 2010 Savannah hearing. The user had no contributions listed, other than creating a glowing biography page for the Reverend Raphael Gamaliel Warnock, Ph.D.

In my eyes, Senator-elect Warnock excised the memory of my friend – my brilliant, thoughtful, soft-spoken, wrongfully executed friend – in a gyre of bluster and bombast. In my eyes, his eulogy that began with him using the bully pulpit to secure better seating for his family represented his own ambition and the devil’s bargain Troy, I, and others had made – to accept the help from those who hoped to ride Troy’s fame to the very top. We needed every signature on those petitions. I knew, as Troy did, that sometimes you take what you can get.

Maybe this glimpse of Senator-elect Warnock isn’t fully representative of him. Maybe he’s changed since then. But I hope when he goes to the Senate and represents my home state of Georgia, he won’t erase the millions who voted for him the way he erased Troy.

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Eight Years Ago

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Eight years ago today, Troy Davis was executed. And four years ago today, Remain Free was published.

I still remember the night of the execution: Wednesday, September 21, 2011. I was a freshman. I had just finished my very first college exam and left Myers Hall to hop in my little red Chevy, which sputtered and struggled to get me down to Death Row in Jackson, Georgia. I remember the thousands of protesters—and the dozens of counter protesters. It was a chaotic scene—laughing, screaming, crying, praying, acrimonious chants battling each other and harmonious chants sung in unison. I remember when the riot police arrived, the prickly sound of their tasers in action, the officers downing a man who crossed the line, the muscular arms hauling him off into the back of the van while helicopters whirred overhead.

I remember the sudden hush over the crowd at 7:00 PM, the moment of execution, the sun setting, the riot police in their gear staring impassively from across the divide.

I remember the jubilation when the news spread that the execution wasn’t happening tonight, that the Supreme Court had issued a one day stay of execution. I hopped in my sputtering red Chevy and drove back to Myers Hall, promising to come back the next day. I remember the horror when I learned that the execution had only been delayed for a few hours, and so all I could do was sit in the Myers lobby and watch Anderson Cooper on CNN countdown and then announce that Troy Davis had been executed. I remember the confusion, the fear, the numbness when the next day I opened Myers mailbox 382A and saw a letter from Troy, the last one I would ever receive.
—
Four years later, on September 21, 2015, Remain Free was published. There was no launch party, no fanfare. Instead, we drove to Savannah and visited Troy’s grave. He’s buried next to his mother and his sister—they all died in 2011. I wrote a note in the front cover of the book and placed it on his grave, along with a replica of the wristband I first got in Wright Square in Savannah in 2010, outside the federal courthouse where Troy’s evidentiary hearing was being held—the first time Troy had been back to his hometown since his conviction in 1991. It’s the same as the wristband I still wear today, blue with white letters illuminating two sentences:

I AM TROY DAVIS. INNOCENCE MATTERS.

Naveen and Troy

gautam 3 Comments

Today is the one year anniversary of my father’s sudden and unexpected death. It’s also the birthday of Troy Davis, my friend who was executed on death row in 2011 and whom I wrote Remain Free about. These were the two most influential men in my life, so I thought I’d share a few words on their relationship.

Both my father and I were moderate supporters of the death penalty in 2008, before we met Troy. So when we first heard about Troy’s case, we were both skeptical of this death row inmate’s claim of innocence—for me, it was because I had this naive, childlike faith in our justice system and institutions; for my father, I think there was a certain cynicism that that led him to distrust people by default, and who less trustworthy than a convicted cop killer?

Nonetheless, on September 23, 2008, the day Troy came within 90 minutes of execution, it was my father who was the first to tell me the execution had been stayed. My mother was adamant we accept Troy’s offer to visit him on death row six days later, but my father did not share her enthusiasm. By design, he had built a bubble in the suburbs for his kids—a safe, if a bit dull, life, far enough away from the city to be mostly free from the drugs, gangs, and violence that plagued Atlanta and the neighborhoods in Savannah where Troy grew up. I think he was afraid of us puncturing that bubble to enter the world that he had fought so hard to stay away from.

He came with me the first time I ever went to a Troy Davis rally, a few days before Troy faced another execution date in October 2008, I was transfixed. I was 15 years old, and captivated by these speakers talk about justice and freeing Troy. But he was unimpressed. He grew up in India, a bustling, chaotic democracy that was never bereft of rallies, protests, or the occasional bandh (general strikes and infrastructure shutdowns by political activists). For him, this was just another street corner rally.

I think his mind changed when he finally met Troy. Troy was so genuine and warm and kindthat nobody could meet him and not want to fight for him, to save him. I can’t remember exactly what they spoke about on those visits, but when I left for college, Troy, in his final letter, said, “I know he misses you more than you’d even imagine.” He was right, of course. He usually was about these sorts of things.

After two or three visits, my father stopped coming to see Troy on death row. Not because he didn’t care, but because “it is too depressing seeing Troy in there.” From his voice, I could tell how deeply death row disturbed him. This was not the safe life in the suburbs he had worked so hard to build for us.

But he would still wake up early in the mornings on those Saturdays we visited Troy, make the 90 minute plus drive to Jackson, Georgia, and wait across the street at the Wendy’s while we met with Troy for six hours. He would still drive me to rallies, and drop me off and pick me up at the train station when I interned at Amnesty International but couldn’t drive. Like me, he was no longer a supporter of the death penalty. And on September 21, 2011, the night Troy was executed, only five years and 19 days before his own death, he was there protesting with me outside death row, chanting “I Am Troy Davis” into the setting sun.

—

If you knew my father or would like to honor his memory, please make a donation to an education-related charity of your choice—education was a cause he cared deeply about. If you’re not sure where to donate, two organizations I like are Pratham and DonorsChoose.

If you knew Troy or would like to honor his memory, please make a donation to the Innocence Project, a non-profit that helps free wrongfully convicted individuals through DNA testing and works to prevent wrongful convictions from happening in the first place.

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Five years ago

gautam 2 Comments

Five years ago today, my friend Troy Davis was wrongfully executed. One year ago today, I published Remain Free to share his story.

In that one year:

  • Remain Free beat out a New York Times bestseller written by a US president for the Georgia Author of the Year Award
  • Remain Free has been featured in NRI Pulse, India New England News, Khabar Magazine, and the Sunday edition of the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Khabar Magazine, and India New England News
  • I’ve spoken at MIT, Cornell, UGA, Georgia State, Kennesaw State, high schools, Amnesty International groups, and CreativeMornings Boston (with a few more to come!)
  • I’ve met and talked to incredible people from all walks of life who share a passion for reforming our justice system, ranging from the parents of other teenagers who’ve befriended death row inmates to rappers, fashion designers, entrepreneurs, and everything in-between.

 

To mark the one year anniversary of the publication of the physical copy of Remain Free, the one many of you made possible, I just published the Kindle version so people all over the world can read it. As with the physical version, all profits will be donated to the Innocence Project.  And of course, the book can be read in serialized from for free on remainfree.com

In the end, this was to serve the mission of sharing Troy’s story with as many people as possible. A huge thanks to all of you who’ve supported this journey that began around this time eight years ago.

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Coming of Age on Death Row

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CreativeMornings Boston has posted my talk from May 2016, titled “Coming of Age on Death Row”. The teaser:

I fight to live so you can remain free

What happens when the realities of a suburban teenager and the world’s most well-known death row inmate collide? The answer involves secret phone recordings, a maximum-security prison, bizarre interpretations of the Eighth Amendment, a tense confrontation with a Supreme Court justice, and an unlikely friendship that would alter the future of both involved

Thanks to all the fine people of CM Boston for hosting me!

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Remain Free Book Discussion on May 16, in Boston

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I’ll be hosting a Remain Free book discussion and signing at Trident Booksellers (338 Newbury St, Boston, MA 02115) on Monday, May 16, at 7:00 PM! I’ll be reading several excerpts from the book and discussing the events within those excerpts in more detail, as well as the process of writing the book. Trident is Boston’s largest independent bookstore and they’ve got great food as well, so I hope to see you there!

 

Serializing Remain Free

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Serializing Remain Free

Remain Free

I wrote Remain Free with one primary mission in mind: to share Troy Davis’s story with as many people as possible. To that end, I’m serializing Remain Free online (at www.remainfree.com) and making it freely available for anyone to read. You can begin reading it here. I also have plans to serialize an audiobook version of Remain Free in the form of a podcast. In both cases, new sections/episodes will be posted weekly.

If you prefer a physical version, a hardcover copy is available on Amazon. As before, all profits from physical and e-book sales will be donated to the Innocence Project.

Thanks again to the many people who supported this book when I first began writing it as an eighteen-year-old.

Keynote Address at the Cornell International Affairs Conference VI

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Keynote Address at the Cornell International Affairs Conference VI, November 5, 2015

Good evening. Before I begin, I’d like to thank the Cornell International Affairs Society for giving the opportunity to speak to you all tonight, and for organizing this wonderful conference.

Tonight, I want to tell you a story. It begins when I was 15 years old, on September 3, 2008, in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia. I received a phone call from a friend. He was an intern for Amnesty International, a human rights organization I had never heard of. He told me about this man on death row in Georgia named Troy Davis. Troy Davis was convicted in 1991 for the 1989 murder of a police officer in Savanah, Georgia. There was no gun, no DNA evidence. Instead, his conviction rested primarily on nine eyewitness testimonies. In the years that followed, seven of the nine eyewitnesses recanted their testimonies. Many of them said the police coerced or intimidated them into testifying against Troy Davis. Despite all this evidence that he may be innocent, Davis was going to be executed in just 20 days.

At the time, I didn’t think it was a big deal. I was a supporter of the death penalty, as most other people in Georgia are. Troy Davis couldn’t possibly be innocent—we had a justice system that protected the innocent and dispensed fair, just punishments to the guilty. If he were innocent, he wouldn’t have lost appeal after appeal.

But there was one small detail that stood out to me, one tiny thing that, in hindsight, changed my life forever. Davis was scheduled to be executed on September 23, while the Supreme Court was due to review his case on September 29. Why? He had been on death row for nearly two decades. Why couldn’t Georgia wait six more days for the highest court in the land to review his case? A fair justice system wouldn’t do that.

On September 23, 90 minutes before the scheduled execution, the US Supreme Court intervened and prevented Troy Davis from being executed. The next day, I sent him a letter. At his invitation, I visited him on death row five days later.

Before I went there, my idea of death row was Alcatraz blended with the gulag. I imagined death row to be dark and dank, filled with angry muscular men, killers and rapists who were destroyers of lives and families. They seemed more beast than human. They were monsters.

Before, everyone in here was just a mugshot and a name written in fine newsprint. But now, as I saw them talking and smiling and laughing and crying, no different than me, it was inescapable that they were . . . human. These were bodies and souls that had known loss and love, cruelty and kindness, pain and joy—beings that had known life. One inmate held his four-year-old daughter up with tears of joy. A boy my age was clad in a shirt with the words “Free My Dad” on the back. Troy told me about the background of many of the other death row inmates—how they had suffered from neglect, child abuse, and drug addiction. He told me about a man who was abandoned as a child. His mother was addicted to drugs, his father was nowhere to be found, and he slept in a dog kennel for shelter. That began the downward spiral that resulted in him on death row.
He told me his own story, about growing up as a quiet kid struggling to fit in, about seeing his hometown get taken over by drugs and gangs in the 1980s. He saw his friends start doing drugs, dealing drugs, or both. He told me his version of what happened the night of the shooting. He was at the wrong place at the wrong time. He didn’t shoot the police officer; he didn’t even have a gun that night. But once somebody else said he did it, the police didn’t consider any alternative suspects and the media started a witch hunt and convicted him in the court of public opinion. He turned himself in, because he thought he could tell the police his side of the story and they’d let him go. When he turned himself in, they hurled racial slurs at the black man who had taken one of their own. They tried to poison his food in the county jail when he was awaiting trial.

He told me he no longer celebrates his birthday, or Christmas, or New Year’s. Why bother, he told me, when it’s just another day you can’t be with the people you love? He said every time he sees his family it’s like they instantly age 20 years, because in his dreams and memories he always sees them as they were in 1989, when he was first locked up. In those 20 years, his father had died, his sister had been diagnosed with cancer, and the rest had aged, lost muscle, gained wrinkles. Every time they visited, he relived all of that. He said the first thing he was going to do when he was a free man was go to his mother’s house and sleep at the foot of her bed so that, when she woke up, she’d know this wasn’t a dream and that her son was finally home.

We grew close. The prison only allowed me to visit him every few months, but in between visits we wrote letters and talked on the phone. He began calling me his “adopted nephew” and signed his letters “Uncle Troy.”

While all of this was going on, Troy’s story attracted a lot of international attention, in part because of the growing international trend against capital punishment. The United Nations began angling for restricted use and eventual abolition of the death penalty in the 1960s. This has culminated in a series of successive resolutions since 2007 (the year Troy Davis first faced execution) that have imposed a moratorium on the death penalty, with the long term goal of its abolition. Year after year, the United States stands in the minority of countries voting against those resolutions, along with countries like China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Iraq. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon has openly stated that the death penalty has no place in the 21st century. The UN Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights specifically spoke out against Troy Davis’s execution.

The European Union, where the death penalty has been abolished, wrote directly to the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles to speak out against Troy Davis’s execution. The European Parliament passed a resolution calling for Troy Davis’s sentence to be commuted and for Georgia to grant him a retrial. Two Nobel Peace Prize winners spoke out against his execution. So did the Pope. All of these international institutions and figures didn’t speak out about Troy Davis because this was just a specific case of an innocent man slipping through the cracks. Rather, it was because his case was one of the most egregious examples of a system that was in itself a human rights violation.

That got me thinking, how do these human rights violations occur? What makes them possible? They occur when we successfully dehumanize the victims. And by only presenting mugshots and rap sheets, our society has dehumanized those on death row. I saw whole human beings as nothing more than the worst mistake they had ever made, as mugshots and rap sheets. And it was only by going to death row and building a personal connection with the people there was I able to break through that.

I think I would’ve eventually opposed capital punishment if I hadn’t met Troy Davis. There are plenty of practical reasons to oppose it. But I wouldn’t be here talking to you tonight. I wouldn’t have signed petitions. I wouldn’t have organized meetings. I wouldn’t have joined rallies. I wouldn’t have become a human rights activist. I wouldn’t have written a book. I wouldn’t have built the personal connection with many other people that convinced them to turn against the death penalty. I wouldn’t have a life’s mission like I do today, which is to fulfill Troy’s dream of a nation without any more Troy Davises.

My challenge to you is to find your Troy Davis. Find that personal connection to your work, whatever it is. If you’re a writer, go and talk to the people who read what you write. If you’re a programmer, meet the people who use your code. If you’re a teacher, truly understand your students. If you’re a fashion designer, meet those who wear your clothes. Find the people who are directly impacted by what you do.

Having proximity to your work changes you. It makes you believe that what you’re doing truly makes a difference, because you’ve seen it with your own eyes. It makes you understand that what you do actually has a real impact on other people. It’s so easy for us to get caught in the ivory tower, to write memos and join committees and make resolutions, without actually doing the hands-on work needed to see the actual, on-the-ground impact of our work. It’s like having a super power, because when you have that inspiration, when you have that motivation, you will always be better and more effective than the people who don’t.

In the end, by a margin of one vote, the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles let Troy Davis be executed. But he wasn’t afraid to die. I talked to him, and he said, “God hasn’t failed me. He just isn’t ready for me to come home yet. Look at all the people I’ve inspired, people like you. Millions of people around the world know my name, and know I’m not the only one. If I die, I don’t want my supporters to fade away in sorrow. I want them to get angry and fight for other Troy Davises out there, and fight for human rights all round the world.”

Go out and find your Troy Davis. Gain your superpower. It may not be easy, but in such cases I always remember what Troy told me whenever I doubted myself: The only person who can stop you from doing something is you.

Thank you.

(Photo courtesy of the Cornell International Affairs Society)

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