Good Books Part II

Reefer Madness is composed of three major assays: one on the absurd laws against marijuana, one on the illegal immigrant workers in California, and one on the porn industry in the US. All three of them are very interesting and I highly reccommend them to any one who is interested in understanding the dark side of the mightiest nation, but I will focus on the one on immigrant workers because it made me cry in public (on the plane).

I understand the unfairness of people being punished more severely for possessing a minuscule amount of marijuana than commiting murder in some states. I understand the sentiment of people who needs pot to take the edge off their debilitating disease. If we are allowed to stay awake more than our body would normally do by drinking coffee, those people should be allowed to use marijuana to alleviated the physical pains. I can also understand how absurd the laws against pornography are in a country that appeared so liberal from the outside (like, have you seen Britney's leatherwear?). But I assume most of us agree that the majority of pot consumed are for recreation, and porn is always recreational. However, produce is not recreational. Proper housing and working conditions are not recreational.

The strawberry pickers in California have it as bad or even worse than the conttonfield slaves before the civil war. Well they have the freedom to leave the country and go home, as some cold-hearted people might argue, but what is freedom without some degree of financial freedom? What is freedom if you cannot afford medicine and education for your children? People who were born in the third world countries did not choose to be there. They didn't end up their because of anything they did (unless you believe in the Buddhist Reincarnation, but if you do you would have mercy on all things living any way). People like us never had a taste of real poverty only because we were lucky. The people who detest the illegal immigrants blame them for intruding "their country" should remember that immigration laws and country borders are set up by men; they were never "sacred".

Many, many workers in the Californian strawberry fields have no proper housing. Sure they have no protection from the union and they don't get minimum wage and they don't even know whether they still have a job every morning. Those facts are probably well-known so they don't seem as terrible as they should be to us. But no proper place to sleep is outrageous. Among them the ones who are better off may sleep on the floor in a garage or share a house with say, 30+ other workers, the luckless ones sleep outside. The description of one "campsite" the author visited brought me to tears. The young man lives among the woods, sleeping under a garbage bag propped with sticks. When it rains they simply get wet. These are people who work 12 hours a day bent in the strawberry fields. These are the people who work in such terrible conditions that they tend to have really bad backs in their twenties/thirties and have a life expectancy under 50 years. These are the people who provide us with the beautiful strawberries we enjoy, and they can't even afford a roof over them.

The worst part about the situation is that, even under such unfavorable conditions, they are still willing to leave their families (and beds, they did sleep in beds before they come here) for, say, 5 bucks an hour or less. I cannot imagine how bad things are in Mexico then. Maybe the US troops should go arrest the Mexican president or whatever the equivalent is for mistreating his people after they are done in Iraq.