American life has become a carnival in which we either watch or perform. We seldom do both at once - The Carnival of Lost and Found. The found seek lost. The lost seek each other. All entertain and owner sells tickets. It's hard to lose money with good entertainment - money and entertainment. That's best marriage of all. Radio, print, television, video, computers, politics and religion; surely difference is in profits.

Have you heard about Ad Busters? They are making thirty second TV un-commercials. The message tells viewer he or she is being controlled and manipulated by all other messages on screen. TV stations and networks refuse to air ads. They don't want to risk offending people who pay to control and manipulate us. Ad Busters' strategy is to pass legislation that forces TV guardians to sell two minutes of each hour of programming for consumer de programming or what we might call public service announcements. I think there is a good chance they will obtain this legislation.

I think ads might backfire. I don't watch much TV, but I think I'd like to see these ads. It would probably be unrealistic to expect them to have any more effect than Surgeon General warnings on cigarette packs. Ad Busters spokesman said idea is to shake people out of their apathy. An admirable goal to be sure, it may be like getting a sleeping man out of bed. You can get him out, but you can't keep him out.

Apathy itself is an interesting thing. How is it created? How is it overcome? Surely apathy is created by a perception or a point of view. Perhaps it comes from wanting and infrequently obtaining what is wanted. We develop a sense that our efforts achieve little positive result and we are mocked. Make no effort, get no result and there is no mockery.

The abused and neglected child eventually learns to abuse and neglect others because s/he has learned from negative models; in home, school and neighborhood. S/he sees life as a struggle for survival and power. Poorly equipped to use power constructively through observation, any power is most often applied destructively and eventually, unlawfully.

Society does not want to see that criminals, in most cases, begin as victims for who law offers little to no protection. Society, in its foolishness, pays for crimes committed by its victims. It pays for investigation and apprehension of its new criminals. It pays for prosecution of them, and then pays for years of housing them in cruel, degrading, inhumane and humiliating cages. Cages that increase neglect and abuse that set people on a criminal path in first place; cages that transform people into beasts and monsters, no matter what crime.

In many cases a convict was supporting or contributing to support of a family when arrested. The loss of family support then becomes an obligation to restore to innocent that which imprisonment denies them. Society likes to think a prisoner is paying a debt to society. The prisoner is paying nothing to society for caging allows a prisoner to do little or nothing of social value. It is society that at once pays all costs relating to caging and is creating a debt to prisoner that will never be repaid. The recovery of prisoner's lost production.

Society, in its infinite foolishness, prefers one size fits all punishment and cares nothing about punishment fitting crimes. Confinement fits crime of kidnapping and murder. Confinement is murder. One day at a time. Fear, resentment, anger and rage provide daily sustenance for prisoners. When they then behave as we should expect, new punishments are heaped upon them.

Next, society decides prisoners have been punished enough and they are released with advice to get their act together. No grubstake, little hope for lawful employment and probably little family support. They violate parole or re offends in some fashion because they have become institutionalized and socially dysfunctional, by abuse and neglect of cruel and usual punishment. The cycle repeats.