Our prisons are certainly filled with them, disposable
lives. Thieves, psychotics, sadists, bullies, animalistic shadows of unfulfilled
human beings, pitiful spiritless thugs, addicts and drunks who have no memory
of sober days in recent years except in prison. All know despair quite well
even if their awareness seldom extends beyond themselves. They had lived their
lives in ignorance, in worlds of threat and evasion, some driven by risk and adrenaline.
Unlike in the movies and Christianist millionaire pastor's sermons, few of them see their life’s purpose as devotion to evil,
a lot of them see it all as “self-defense,” or accurately assessed “stupid
moves”, and a few see it as defiance of authority. And, also contrary to some
movie depictions, very, very few of them are evil geniuses like in action
movies. For the most part the prison population represents a very low
percentile of the intelligence curve. A lot of this is self inflicted from drug
and alcohol use, trading their intelligence for the excessive self indulgence
of misspent youth or trading intelligence for a numbing stupor for escape.
Our prison population does not have a very large population
of greedy people. This human failing doesn’t seem to fully kick in until
someone has more income than they know what to do with. They evade punishment
much more than they should. And, there's where the evil geniuses lie, in the board rooms and CEO offices of Corporate greed. And, now our "greed is good" infected Supreme Court has destroyed the last vestige of democracy in its ruling that money is speech. This American Plutocracy thrives on human suffering. Where indoctrinating children is a profit center, where physical pain is a profit center, and of course, the biggest government profit center selling munitions and drones to the military for an endless war on those who hate us. (be careful, Rush Limbaugh thinks "liberals" hate America. He would gladly send the liberals to concentration camps)
So, for every criminal whose life in prison and before is
filled with desperate circumstance, there must be hundreds, maybe thousands, of
Americans who know despair intimately. Certainly sales of antidepressants would
indicate despairing Americans number in the tens of millions. All American
Sadness is not the result of the Obama Presidency (as the Republicans would
have it.) Nor is it from personal moral failure and sin (as the compassionate
right would have us think.) It’s not always the result of bad faith or evil
demons (as the religious further right insists.) And, of course, it’s not the
fault of people with darker skins (as the farthest, stupidest right preaches.)
“The pursuit of Happiness,” It’s such an admirable goal for
us as individuals and as a society. Why do so many of us fail at it?
For one thing, many of our maps down that road are
hopelessly antiquated. They weren’t made for a world as diverse and complicated
as ours (the American Right’s extremist map repudiates diversity and does not believe in
complication or scientific truth, there is only right and wrong, good and evil,
us and them. Their map points only in the direction of copious amounts of
personal wealth and the physical pleasures it can buy.) This map impairment, in itself, accounts for some
considerable amount of grief. People trapped in lives chosen based on the wrong
assumptions, children enslaved by parents who don’t care enough for them. There’s
the source of a lot of emotional pain.
But, of course, our society has made choices based on wrong
assumptions. It’s been a mantra of the Right that the failure of individuals in
our society to be responsible for their actions is a fundamental social flaw.
It’s your fault that you can’t take the blame for your unemployable personality. "Blame yourself", as Herman Cain famously said, specifically talking about the unemployed. This idiotic philosophy is a symptom of a society that's falling apart. No longer a democracy, America has seen it's better days. If we can't end the political power of that money obsessed Koch infused Gollum party that stirs resentments and hatred to bury our democracy, then we don't deserve to call ourselves a democracy.
