THREE STRIKES: AMERICA'S NEXT TABOO?

by

Dortell Williams

300 words Non-fiction

America has a lot of taboo subjects. Religion and politics top the lists. These are subjects "you just don't talk about."

However, there are still other topics at which the mere mention evokes an acute cringe. Race relations, for example, is a subject many would rather avoid, especially when it leads to that of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

The slave trade involved the systematic kidnapping of millions of Africans, for the purpose of work exploitation in this country. Families were separated; never to see one another again. The women were maliciously mistreated and viciously raped. The children in worked in such gruesome conditions, it would make today's child labor complaints trivial. The men savagely beaten, over worked and killed. Slavery is a repulsive American tragedy that we really don't like to discuss. The nauseating subject indeed a American taboo.

Jim Crow laws followed: separate but equal was the rule on paper, but in reality, the Negroes, as we were called, got the literal and the metaphorical pig scraps that the ruling class rejected. In education, health care, housing and in courts of law, Negroes were served the intestines of social services. That is how the rules and laws were written, and to the majority of White America these unfair and unequal edicts were perfectly fine.

Americans also shy away from the troubled conditions of today's Native American. High unemployment, rampant alcoholism and pervasive poverty plague the Native American. To most modern day Americans it is no secret that the Natives were here first. These remarkable people lived here for centuries without prisons or mass human killing devices. The Natives American was a family oriented soul - knit as one in community. These people were the epitome of environmentalists. They lived with the land; as part of the land, and were gracious servant stewards of the land.

Then came the colonialist; bringing with them destructive disease, cold-blooded murder and the cruelest of rape. They trampled over everything that came before them- respecting nothing- not even life.

These are the subjects that Americans does not like to talk about. We'd rather ignore this history; this giant in the room; this factual elephant that reveals a glimpse of why these and other minorities rate so dismally in the aftermath of such atrocities. The patterns of unique struggles of the formally ravished are unequivocally consistent. Meanwhile, most Americans wish this shameful history would simply and quietly go away.

Yet, how can it go away when we have so many current reminders of the past? As history repeats itself, over and over again, the one thing we can glean from it is a guide into the future.

California's Three Strike law is a reminder of a capricious yesterday. Come twenty-five years from now will Three Strikes be another of our unmentionables? A taboo subject desperately hid behind the shame of a law that has been statistically and numerically proven to be minority inclined? As an example, Blacks make up just seven percent of Californians population, yet, represent a devastating forty percent of the three-striker population.

Three Strikes is an unforgiving law that goes back in time and penalizes - for life - old offenses that occurred twenty, forty and fifty years age. Three Strikes is a law that incarcerates eternally, for petty and non-violent offenses.

Three Strides unnecessarily separates families - en mass - as did slavery. The onerous law is likened to the furtherance of colonialism. Three Strikes is horrendously unconscionable.

Three Strikes is a vicious and wicked law that I'm afraid will, if not reformed be America's next taboo.

Sources:

www.factsl.org

www.cdcr.ca.gov