The Advocate

(Credit: Kevin "Rashid" Johnson) If you're a fan of Netflix's  Orange is The New Black, then you know exactly what I'm talking about here. With the release of season 4  this sentiment has been brought to the forefront of a show that not only pushes the boundaries of television, but of our entire concept of social justice in a country simultaneously more progressive than ever and yet also more oppressive in sheer numbers than at any other time in history. But for me, the core of what OITNB has shown us over the course of this season is that, regardless of what you've done: y ou are still a person . Maybe you sold crack. Maybe you robbed someone. Maybe you even killed someone. That doesn't mean you are no longer human. That doesn't mean you deserve the kind of treatment we're seeing in America , courtesy of the prison-industrial complex, bigotry, and apathy. As seen through the eyes of prisoners, former prisoners, and investigative journa

( Credit to playwright Ernest Hemmings. ) Whether you're talking 'bout President  Obama is spreading Ebola , Secretary  Hillary deliberately caused Benghazi , or the thought that Earth is, actually, as flat as the ass of pancake , conspiracy theories seem to reproduce like a rabbit-mouse hybrid in heat. I grew up amongst many of them through the 90's and early 2000's. From apples laced with razor blades to HIV-infected needles in the parks and playgrounds of the neighborhood, or on the handles of the local gas station pump. Others were less well-known, such as the Native-American ghosts that haunted our high school campus and killed the science teacher on back-to-school night. Or the mysterious oil-derricks hidden between Huntington Beach and Costa Mesa in a locked-down facility that, purportedly, housed a testing ground for experimental weaponry and post-apocalyptic machinery. Indeed, I've actually tread those very lines myself as a teenager, searching f

I keep dropping knowledge bombs // Quick-like on villages of the bigoted and ignorant // From high-above the Ivory Towers and Golden Parachutes and Brick-Mortar Bunkers I fly // But when the firestorm has passed ashes are all I find // Of cognitive dissonance, of double-speak and lies // Spread across cyberspace like so much trash // Can't even find a single corpse to prove that falsehood was hit // Until the next village I see // Always the next // Crops up on my radar shooting flak at my wax wings // And back to bomb I go again, a toy soldier to the toddler What's the point in having all human knowledge // At your fingertips when you can't even comprehend it? // What's the point in having intelligence // If they never use it?