This past Friday I was eager to set about my plans for the day. Close the blinds, shut the phone, get comfortable and binge on the last season of one of my favorite shows, Orange is the New Black. I was happy and sad, for I believe it brought forth many important ideas and statements, comments on us as we watched the attitude of America towards its felons.
One accepted the fact, though hating it, about life in a prison of the Russian gulag or a Chinese reeducation camp, or a Korean labor camp. Horrific! But to expect these same conditions, or roads and paths leading to the same end, here, in our own country, was, to put it mildly, offputting to the extreme.
From the beginning of the series we saw how the economics of privately run prisons was not good for the prisoners, to say the least. Nor was it good for the guards either, as wallowing in muck makes one filthy as well. Prisoners were subhuman in the eyes of all, management and guards, even as guards were not treated or paid very well. Corruption was rife. All these are facts that we know exist today, right in our prisons.
No one is saying that we need to provide Hilton Honors standards in prisons, but what we need to do is be decent, not make money off the backs of prisoners, not mistreat them, reduce them to untermenschen, and take away all that is meant to reform prisoners, and help make them productive members of society when they get out.
No, I am not an idiot and know there are dangerous people among these felons but that still does not make them animals, to be referred to as such. And yet, look at our 'camps' for immigrants. Watching the first six episodes, three at a time, for the presentations were that powerful and the heart has a limit, especially when it so closely reflects the truth, I was ashamed to be an American, ashamed that the demented and immoral man and his minions represented me to the rest of the world. The prisons or holding camps for the immigrants here were portrayed a bit better, but the same overcrowding, the same could care less attitudes towards them, the lack of compassion, the lack of accepting people as Americans, who lived here for so many years and the documents? What the hell do they mean in real life? There is a concept that life experience equals job experience so what about here? Does it not make one a citizen when raised here from a child, having worked for years, started a business, paid taxes - and yes, they pay that and social security as well - sent children to college, served in the armed forces? But no, we keep denying facts.
Is it American to speak about American cities and Americans in the way that Trump does? What is next? The roundup of all those he deems non Americans, never mind their birth or naturalization? Or perhaps he is looking for people to sell their estate holdings to Jared who already has slum holdings in Baltimore!! You know, guess he is doing his patriotic duty by having 'infested' apartments!
We have lost our way. Deep into the forest are we and I wonder if there is a rescue team that will find us or is even looking. Starve children, take away food help for them and their families but keep increasing the tax cuts for the bloated rich. Never mind the growing homelesness as housing for lower and middle classes are going, going, almost gone and one has to step over and around encampments, bodies sleeping on the street, or even giving people the food one has for their own lunch!!
We think it okay to say that a woman sexually harassed is believable, but really, the guy who is accused is such a good guy, a general, so why think he would do that? Why? For power! And there is no difference between that guy and the Taliban or ISIS or yes, American, soldier who rapes a woman of the other nation!! Chew on that for a while!
As for the 'go back' refrain, well, that is what the people on the St. Louis heard in 1939 as their ship of refuge was turned away by Western Hemisphere countries, including America, turned away by European countries until guilt finally allowed some to debark and note, that of 937 passengers only the ones who got off in England lived through it all. The rest? Dead of starvation, of torture, of labor, of bullets, of gassing, of beatings, of drownings, of medical experiments and the ugly list goes on and on. That is what GO BACK means and all those Jews who forget that, all the Irish who forget how their families came here escaping the famine, the Italians who came here for a better life after the poverty of Italy and Sicily, all the refugees who took up the Lady of Liberty on her words of welcome - we are all the same. We were just lucky as our people came here sooner so what the hell is the difference?!
Contrary to the nasty one, we have plenty of land and jobs open for new immigrants, and there is always a need for new blood, new outlooks, new thinking. What we have done is internalize the nastiness portrayed from real life onto TV and we live that. We actually have people who think "it is my job and I am following orders" is an excuse for mistreatment of others. No, it is not, and did we not execute people for that after war crime trials in Nuremberg? Why have we forgotten? What have we forgotten?
Orange and black and whatever damned colors we shroud our prisoners in, be they citizens or undocumented people, these colors negate the meaning of the other colors of our lives - red, white and blue.We should hang our heads in shame. Democrats - time to fish or cut bait. Push the demands for records and testimony through court. Throw deniers and obstructors into jail where we can, share these colors with them. Republicans, where the hell are your values, your spines, whatever makes a person righteous -- you have lost yours.
Time to get that man out of office and if the Republicans in the Senate continue to support this proven acceptor of aid from enemy countries, who profits knowingly from his private business while President, who speaks disparagingly about his own people and country while he praises his BFFS, well, then screw you and time for you to leave office as well.
RED WHITE BLUE
I want those colors and their promise, their meaning, back again.
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