Composition

I have a friend at work who’s husband is a former journalist for the Detroit Free Press.  He now does technical writing but he still keeps a blog running as a creative outlet.  The website is writestuf.com…I’ve read numerous articles of his and I enjoy his writing style.    I am posting one of his articles that he notified me about on his site.

Paris has turned America into a disgusting version of “Fantasy Island”

This entry was posted on 6/27/2007 12:50 PM and is filed under The Real World.

I don’t think I’ve ever been more disgusted or ashamed to be an American than I was Tuesday watching Paris Hilton leave the Los Angeles County Jail to a sea of flash bulbs as if she were some conquering hero just returned from helping save the world.

Disgusted and ashamed aren’t even strong enough words, to tell you the truth.
Sad and angry is how I really felt.

Sad because a 20-something year old millionaire heiress, who just finished a less than two-week stay in isolation at a county jail is treated with more respect than men and women who’ve been in jail for years, wrongly accused of crimes they never committed.

Angry because in Georgia right now an 18-year-old black teenager sits serving a 10 year sentence for having consensual oral sex with a white girl two years ago when they were both underage.
His sentence was just overturned a few weeks ago by Georgia’s appellate court, ruling the punishment was too harsh and didn’t fit the crime.
Nevertheless, he still sits behind bars because the prosecutor who put him there refuses to let him out, filing motion after motion to keep him in jail until he can take the case before the state’s supreme court.

The mother of the girl he had sex with says he should be let out, the public’s sentiment is the same and the appellate court has even ruled that he be freed.
All this is happening in a state that has a long and well-documented history of inequality when it comes to justice for blacks vs. whites.

Still, there’s not one paparazzi camped outside the jail where this kid is.

Probably because they were all in L.A. trying to get a picture of a spoiled little rich girl, who spent less than a month in jail because she was too stupid not to drive while already on probation for another stupid driving offense months earlier.

What does this tell you about the country we live in?

Ok … let’s go to the scorecard and weigh the two:
Black teenager still in jail for having sex although a court says he should be free vs. rich little white girl who has served less than two weeks in a county jail.

Hmmmmm. Which story seems more deserving and compelling of endless media coverage to you?

It’s really no contest. BUT it shines a rather bright light on exactly the kind of fantasy world this country embraces.

There are kids dying daily thousands of miles from here in a foreign country most all of them never thought they’d ever set foot in.
There are homeless people on the streets with not an ounce of hope for the future.
There’s countless medical issues killing people every day. And some, if not all, of those issues could be wiped out by a few strokes of a pen on legislation by the jackasses in Washington … putting the wheels of research in motion to find cures.

But you turned on any TV channel Tuesday and what did you see?
Paris Hilton and her crap-for-parents mommy and daddy, mugging for the cameras as they drove away from jail in a top-of-the-line SUV, headed to a million dollar mansion to no doubt bask in glory that their ordeal was finally over.

Disgusting.
Completely and utterly disgusting.

(Darron Patterson is an award-winning freelance journalist based in Detroit)

I enjoy the racialized twist he includes in his writing.