What We're NOT Talking About

In all of the recent excitement of the health care bill, and the tea parties, and financial reform and all of this other stuff going on, I feel like there are issues that are vital to our well-being as a country that we are just not talking about. So I'd like to take a moment here to address a few of these.

PRISON REFORM. This is something that I've been interested in for a long time. We all know that our prison system is bad. It seems like we've given up on the ideas of reform and rehabilitation, and have just turned the system over to the inmates to punish each other. The result is that, typically, when a moderately bad person goes into prison, they come out REALLY bad. I can't tell you the number of people that I personally have known who went to prison under Reagan's idiotic mandatory sentencing for having a little pot, and come out addicted to much, much worse. Coke a lot of times, sometimes heroin or meth. Or guys with a small streak of misogyny who are themselves abused so badly by other prisoners that when they come out they are determined to be as hard as they can on women just to try to get a little of what was taken from them back.

We have an opportunity to take these people, most of whom are not educated, and teach them and reach them and change them into functioning members of society, for the most part. I'm not talking about all of them here. Some people are just bad and mean and there's nothing that you can do about it. Sad to say, because I personally think that these people COULD have been saved, if that salvation had come earlier, but by the time they reach adulthood, it's just too late. Some things are too broken to be fixed. But I honestly believe that these are the minority.

So how do we fix it? Well, first off, the prison system needs to take control of the prisons back from the prisoners. They need to start being locked in their cells except when they are in class or brief exercise periods. I guess that what I'm suggesting here is that we could treat most prisons like very strict boarding schools. Take away the opportunity for the prisoners to beat and rape and kill each other.

That's another thing… we have to stop finding jokes about prison rape funny and start finding them repulsive. If you make a joke about a woman or a child being raped you get pilloried… why isn't it the same for a joke about a MAN getting raped? Rape should NOT be a punishment in a country that considers itself not only civilized, but Christian.

Secondly, we need to do away with mandatory sentencing. ALL mandatory sentencing. Period. I know that it's a lot of work, but each case should be considered on its own merits, not rubber-stamped.

Finally, and most egregiously, we need to stop the privatization of prisons. Did you know that prisons are being run for profit in this country? Including payouts to judges for sending people into this crime-for-profit system? No one… no corporation…. should be able to make money off of incarcerated Americans, period. And a lot of these prisons are being used as call centers for telephone solicitation. Think about it… any information that you give to a telephone solicitor may be going to someone in prison for rape or murder.

TOXIC MANUFACTURING PLANTS. I know that even SUGGESTING government regulation of business is, to some Americans in the twenty-first century, tantamount to defending the rape of children, but it's a necessary evil. And part of this is that companies that manufacture chemically evil things like paint and plastic have to be regulated to stop them from poisoning the air, soil and water around them. If you look at things like cancer and asthma, the rates for these things go up disproportionately around areas where chemical manufacturing plants are. But we can't stop them because it's so damned hard to show direct causation. Trust me, folks… we have to get to the point where the circumstantial evidence is enough.

Part of the problem is that we as Americans like our cheap plastic shit. And if these companies have to start spending money to make sure that they keep the environment around them clean, the price for this plastic shit is going to go up. And again, I don't mean outsourcing this poisonous shit to India or China. Anywhere that an American corporation does business, it should be required to play by our rules.

GOVERNMENT WASTE. There's been a big hoopla recently about how we can't "afford" health care. Bullshit. There has been absolutely ZERO discussion about how we can get our government to spend our money wisely and stop wasting it.

I saw a news story last year about an airplane that we've been manufacturing since Viet Nam that has NEVER been used in an operation. Why? It's a piece of junk. It can't fly in the rain because the canopy leaks. It's in need of constant repair. And yet, we continue to spend millions or billions of dollars per year on this piece of crap.

And did you know that every former president has secret service protection for twenty years after they leave office? Again, this needs to be judged on a case-by-case basis. Jimmy Carter didn't need secret service protection until the year 2000. Ronald Reagan, on the other hand, who someone DID try to kill while he was in office, needed more protection.

Before we start talking about cutting funding to schools or social programs, we need to talk about stopping the waste.

Peace.

Rev. Randal