A Requiem For A Dream

"You Are An Inspiration For Birth-Control"

Just to put this out there: the title of this entry has absolutely nothing to do with what I'm about to write. It's just there to deliberately mislead you, but the real, and the more relevant reason, is that I really like Duke Nukem 3D. Duke For President in 08. I mean, how can you NOT vote for a guy who once said this after shooting a female zombie in the head: "I am an equal-opportunity ass-kicker".

Anyways, back on topic, which is this: people don't give former criminals a chance, nope, not a rat's chance in Hell. I understand, it's a natural suspicion, but you at least owe everyone, not just those who are former criminals, some measure of the benefit of the doubt? What if you got into jail for a minor crime, but when you got out, people look you as if at any moment, you are going to spontaneously combust and proceed to brutally massacre their entire family, including the cute-looking three-year old daughter?

I'll give you a personal example. In the apartment complex that I used to live, our manager was an old Mexican dude called Ray. Ray mostly kept to himself, he played his electric keyboard, said hi to the tenants and didn't create trouble for himself or the neighbors. We all thought he was a nice guy, and indeed he was. But a year ago, I found that Ray was a formal child molestor, and he is registered by the state of California. Did that knowledge change my opinion of him? Hell fucking no motherfuckers. I was a little boy when I lived there, and I swear to God, Ray never did a goddamn thing to make me or anyone else suspicious of him. He never gave me any perculiar look, never gave me any strange candy or try to talk to me when I didn't want to.

But, had I known that he was a former pedophile when I moved in, my entire perceptions would've changed. I would've been really cold to him, always talking behind his back, maybe telling shit that I shouldn't be telling to my neighbors, so they in turn can also ostracize him, until he becomes a pariah. Is this fair? Hell fucking no man. Just because he WAS, and notice the operative word here is WAS, a pedophile, doesn't mean he IS one. Hello people, there is something called the PAST, in case you morons are too stupid to discern between the present and the past. Yet if I knew, the entire situation would've changed for Ray, and dramatically worse I might add. Now is that really fair? You might say that Ray hasn't changed, but that's not what the legal system is set out to do: to judge if a man has changed. The legal system sets out to enforce the law, and until Ray has explicitly violated the law, he remains innocent, both in the abstract and in the concrete.

Yet, how many of you will actually treat a former criminal like a human being, especially a former criminal who has commited something as heinous as child-molestation. Don't get me wrong here, I'm not excusing the crimes, but I'm saying that you should at least give people a chance. I mean, you couldn't see a whole entire suburban community leave faster than if you told them that a former pedophile was among them. It's even faster than white flight, and I thought white flight was fast already. Doesn't everyone deserve a chance for redemption? But you would take away that chance, and forever deny peace and quiet for the truly repentant. But I can't blame you, you have interests in protecting yourself, and that's just the way this fucked-up world operates: the truly repentant criminals are treated the same way as the never-do-wells, the stubborn-ass convicts who deservers to burn in Hell.

And plus, what is the fucking point of the entire prison system if we, as a society, do not believe that it does anything other than to lock people up just so we can delay confronting the real issues. I mean, prisons also rehabilitate people, they make people pay their debt to society. How the fuck would you feel if you did time, and you repented, but every single person you meet still treats you like a piece of shit who will rob and murder him? Would you like that? No, you wouldn't want that, and I don't either. But let's be real here, is any of us ever going to do that? No, we'll just be like everyone else and look at former criminals as pieces of shits.

That's the real irony here: we spend billions of tax-money building prisons, but yet we believe the prison system does absolutely jack. What is the logic in that? Why waste billions of your OWN hard-earned money and build prisons that you think are useless? Why not build schools? Oh wait, we already do spend more on building prisons than we do building schools. Someone explains to me why I shouldn't think this world is just a big pussy that is getting fucked and fucked, not by anyone else, but by ourselves and only ourselves.

I admit, this is a difficult moral problem, one with no answers whatsoever. Even God can't help you there, because Jesus loves repentant sinners, but we humans don't, or at least we don't want to believe in repentant sinners.

Posted by humanflyz at August 14, 2005 11:23 PM | TrackBack