To me, this is the crossroads the world is at right now.
I just finished season five of Orange Is the New Black, where the privatized for-profit prison (based on a true story) really shows how fucked up our jails become when they are ran as businesses. Can you think of something else we recently sold out? I’ll give you a hint, it also involves an orange; unfortunately, this one hijacked our oval office.
When you bottom line lives, not only due you display a profound misunderstanding of long term math, but you also belittle life. No one knows exactly how much health care, education, or basic needs will cost in the moment. You provide them to your citizens so that they can pay it forward, and that is sound economic policy, not fucking people in the short term so you get lifelong problems in Flint, Michigan.
Being cheap gets you nowhere. People deserve respect, whether it makes mathematical sense at the time or not. We pulled ourselves out of the great depression by providing these services, and President Obama followed suit when W tried to sink us down once again. You can’t cut people’s livelihoods and expect your country to survive.
And I think the red states need to wake the fuck up. How much longer is religion going to let you miss the obvious, that the rich are getting richer while we scrap together each and every month. It is proven time and time again that it’s a wiser move to invest in your world, so why pretend otherwise anymore?
I watch these poor women in jail and ask myself how different am I? How many petty crimes did I commit in my early 20s that I got away with – whether it was a proven medicine in marijuana that was not yet legal or simply driving recklessly, nothing I was ever charged with.
Remember All Their Faces
I’ve said it before: the theme song to the show tells you to look at all their faces. The last season ended with one of the characters being murdered, and you looked right at her before the end credits began.
We spent this whole season looking for justice, and in the end, there was none. Because we have failed each other, as human beings, when we begin to put money first. No one deserves to die in vain simply due to a lack of funding. Fuck that. And I’ll happily die to protect that right…