“It's called the American Dream because you'd have to be asleep to believe it.”
George Carlin
This diary was prompted by the exemplary work of davidseth who has been diarying about the prisoner hunger strike at Pelican Bay.
Ours is a very stratified society, a veritable layer cake of conditions and privileges. If you are white and middle class, your reality is different from those who are not. Vastly different in many cases, though it is sometimes manifested in subtle ways. If you are affluent, your reality is more different still. Your place in society insulates you from the realities faced by many others. And if you're in the political class or the investment class you might as well live on another planet. Your plush and pampered reality is like no other. It's no wonder that our so-called leaders are clueless beyond belief.
You may have noticed that our society, our many-layered cake, is top heavy when it comes to privileges and benefits. And that, brothers and sisters, may be the understatement of all time. And it's getting worse.
This is not to put anyone on the defensive but rather to challenge people to rise above their place in society, at least briefly, for the sole purpose of taking a long cold look at the larger society that we all share. There are some issues requiring our attention.
I was recently watching a documentary about gang life in Los Angeles. They were interviewing members of a gang called the Asian Boys. These particular guys were from Laos. Having lived there once upon a time, I couldn't help thinking about what these young men might be doing if they were still in Laos: working in the rice fields, selling things on the street, working some job or other, fishing, hunting, harvesting coconuts. But they would most likely not be running in gangs and living the lives of street thugs. Of course I don't know that, there's no way to know such things with any certainty but those were the thoughts running through my head.
Why do good Laotians go bad? Because in our society, at the level open to poor immigrants, gang life is what they have. The alternative, all too often, is to work at McDonalds and get beat up and robbed walking home. The schools in so many of these urban areas are substandard to say the least. Even a bad school can sometimes be a way out for the few who can resist the pull of the streets, if they are very very lucky. But more often the schools fail these kids, try as they might. The odds are certainly against these young Americans. The odds, in fact, are against virtually everyone they know, their parents, neighbors and relations.
Kids join gangs when that's their best or only option. What a shame that this reality is so prevalent, that we can't spare the bottom layers of our society a little icing from the top: good schools, lawful streets, decent jobs, a secure safety net, some attractive and positive alternatives.
Gangs offer a sense of belonging and of being powerful. If we provided alternative means for these kids to feel that they belong and have some power over their own lives, few of them would choose to live as gangbangers and thugs. That's just my opinion of course but one born of watching these dynamics over the course of my life.
Speaking generally, members of the criminal class (non-white collar) are criminals because that is what is available to them in our woefully unjust and profoundly uncaring society. Society could intervene in these dynamics and change the underlying realities if it cared to do so. But instead we'd rather give big fat tax cuts to money-grubbing millionaires and billionaires and their almighty corporations.
As a society we don't care about the poor, we don't care about immigrants, we don't care about the millions of our fellow citizens suffering ungodly conditions in our nation's prisons. The few who do care are frequently democrats. That's why I am a democrat. But our democratic leaders no longer speak of such things. Poor people cannot fuel their horribly expensive political careers so they have become invisible to them. The only people who really matter anymore to our politicians are the big checkbook crowd. God help the rest of us. Of course this is nothing new to the poor. The middle class is headed for a rude awakening though.
Conditions at Pelican Bay, particularly in the SHU but elsewhere as well are beyond the most nightmarish imaginings (there's that word again) of most people. There are good and bone-chilling reasons why it is considered to be one of California's gladiator academies.
I often hear people say that these are bad people who deserve what they get. Problem is we don't know that. We assume they have done something terrible to end up in prison, and they may have...but we don't know that. There are innocent people in prison too. Just ask the good folks at the Innocence Project. And not all the guilty are equal either.
But that, while important, is beside the point. The crux of the matter (IMHO) is how we as a society choose to treat our own citizens. Is our society going to be an 'every man for himself' jungle, or a viable support system for human beings? It is the former. We need to make it the latter.
We lower ourselves when we choose to treat people as vermin. Such attitudes stink up our whole society. It's just like the death penalty - we owe it to ourselves to rise above it. It's less about what we're doing to them and more about what we're doing to ourselves.
There should be a bare minimum of decent treatment to which any and all human beings are entitled.
The horrors we visit upon these people are self-destructive for a society. You most likely don't want to live next door to someone who has just gotten out of Pelican Bay after say ten years. It's possible to do amazing harm to someone in that much time and Pelican Bay is famous for the harm it can and does bestow upon the unlucky ones confined therein.
It's not so much about the prisoners. It's much more about us and what, by our policies, we are doing to ourselves. That's why most societies have banned capital punishment. Because it is barbarism and is rightly rejected by self-respecting, thinking and caring people. We should do the same. And we should take responsibility for the mistreatment and abuse of millions of our own citizens in places like Pelican Bay. And there are examples of such places in every state in the union.
It's not about what they've done. It's about what we've done...and continue to do.
Thanks again for your fine work davidseth. I appreciate it very much.
