The crack pipe of denial
You have all of these rules that don’t fit with the complexities of real life in the real world. Don’t smoke this. But why? Because we say it’s harmful. But the science doesn’t say that. Ok, here, go to jail, get raped for a few months and we’ll see what you say. You don’t hit your wife even though the crazy bitch once punched through a plate glass window and threatens to do it again about once a month. Click the wrong link on the Internet, go to jail. Your browser pre-fetches the wrong page in an innocent Google search (Firefox does this by default) and you go to jail. You can deny and deny and deny all you want to, you are still going to jail and there is not a person who knows you who would argue otherwise because of the shit they found on your hard-drive (“I can’t believe he was into that!”). You will see a story on your local TV news about the guy who got caught with this shit on his computer, they will give your name, and that’s it for your entire life.
It doesn’t matter what you actually do, what your circumstances actually are, or whether you had no control over the situation. If they can catch you, and offer some evidence that you are guilty they will and that’s that. The bruises on her face will make the jury and the public hate you even if you were the one in traction for a month. Not even your lawyer will try very hard. The truth is irrelevant to everybody else but you the way it was irrelevant to you when the same thing happened to somebody else.
Seriously, does it matter to you at all that there are men in prison for crimes they did not commit? Does it matter to you that many of the “releases because of DNA” stories never reach the local, let alone national, news? Does it matter to you that many of the innocent men in prison never committed crimes that would involve DNA evidence? No, it doesn’t, because you don’t want to think about the possibility that it could happen to you, even if you aren’t poor, or from a minority group.
The innocent guy behind bars for another man’s crime is so played-out, has become so much of a cliché that nobody cares anymore, it has lost whatever shock-value or empathetic charm it had before. It’s not as cinematic or entertaining. Once you take away all that good stuff what you have left is the depressing fact of a man who has lost years, often decades of his life in a hellhole with genuinely vicious people. It’s depressing, and who wants to be depressed? Well, ok, at least he’s out now, let’s give him some money and move on. Let’s think about something funny and hip! Hey, wanna see a picture of a cat? It’s a cute cat!
Seriously, escape, diversions, that’s how you choose to handle the difficult things. If you don’t look at all the ugly things showing in through the cracks, then you don’t have to deal with the feeling that maybe you should be doing something, anything, about them. It’s much safer in a darkened room, with an episode of Lost playing on your new flat-panel, and your laptop open on your lap. If you don’t think about the ease with which your rights, your freedom, everything you have worked for, can be taken away from you, without you even trying, then you don’t have to be afraid. You can just light up your little crack-pipe of denial and puff away.
