Crime & Punishment

Call me jaded.

But reading about the 'total change' of the pop tarts who spend slight amounts of time in rehab, jail and on probation makes me ill. How can anyone possibly glean anything useful and/or permanent from 82 minutes in jail? One day in rehab? 4 hours in rehab? And it makes me wonder, just who do they think they are kidding?

Frankly, I DO hope they will sort out their lives free of the cocaine, the booze, the rampant sex and the distorted Hollyweird value system that brings them to the brink anyway. They need to clean up, grow up, sober up and wise up. And buy some dadgum UNDERWEAR!

I just have to tell you that if it were me in all of those unflattering mug shots, the local constabulary and circuit court judge would be SO much less forgiving than the holier than thou crowd in California who believe the faux sincerity and drink it in like so much mother's milk. Makes me wonder just what kind of mother they all had as children. Mommy Dearest springs to mind, but I digress.

Since I am related to a police sergeant and grew up knowing several of the more prominent lawyers in the local legal system, I am quite sure that they would throw me UNDER the jail and throw away the key. None of this '4 hours in scary old rehab and I'm cured' crap.

No siree!

I'd be scrubbing the floors with my toothbrush for all eternity and sharing my spacious cell with some really 'attractive' woman named Wanda who makes meth while babysitting and spending all of my free time learning how to be a hooker in a small town from this woman with three teeth missing right in front.

Who knew? If you are a 'john', I guess the higher YOU are, the better SHE looks. GROSS!!!

Calls to Daddy would go unanswered as he would most assuredly let me experience the joys and sorrows of accountability for my actions. And he would say so on the evening news before God and everybody.

The judge in our community is all about responsibility here, and I am not talking about that PR spin version of responsibility that actually comes out more like 'who can I blame and still keep my career intact?'

His is more like the responsibility that involves 12 steps that you can't skip through, reporting to a probation officer and keeping your nose clean - inside and out. Basically, the judge here is a zero fun kind of guy for the pop tart crowd.

Rehab in the rural part of America understands that you can't get off the moonshine in a couple of hours. It also knows that addiction to drugs takes more than a sound byte to cleanse your body and soul of the craving. More than anything, rehab in this part of the country still involves good, old-fashioned SHAME about what you have done to family, friends, employers and self.

That is one particular element I find missing from the headlines, and the most disturbing.
None of the elite seem particularly shamed to be busted. They only seem annoyed that the party stopped. There is no sense of 'oops - my bad', but instead, it's more like they honestly feel the world should continue to patronize them and make it easier for them because they suffer under the tremendous burden of making more money than the rest of us will ever see for mediocre work performed under the influence.

In order for anyone to be successful in changing their lives, they need to make a complete transformation of all facets of life. They have to be willing to change, pure and simple. To do otherwise is to mock the sincere efforts of those who have realized that they are literally out of options and must change or die.

And that is a truth that you cannot manufacture like a fake tear.

I'd like to see all of those stars sent to our local lock-up. They stuff them into orange jumpsuits or the traditional convict wear of black and white striped pajamas and put their butts out on the road picking up dirty diapers, empty plastic bottles and a host of disgusting roadside refuse that clutters the shoulders of our rural highways. Sounds like photo-op time, boys. Fire up those cameras for the daily rags and make those digital cameras smoke.

Convicts here are given work 'opportunities' that are both public and humiliating. It's pre-arranged payback for the embarrasment their choices have brought into the lives of those who love them and previously trusted them. The trust part has to be earned back the hard way. Even a kindly old Grandma in the South gets sick of making excuses for Peanut's bad behavior and will come upside her head for a lick of sense now and again.

I have a novel idea for the pop tarts and their assorted groupies and sycophants. California judges should sentence the priveledged princesses to hard labor in the post Katrina garbage dump that is still the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans. The rich and famous should get the chance to clean up the mess that is no less devastating in their personal lives than Katrina was and is to the residents of the Big Easy while shoveling out some post storm damage.

And they shouldn't get any special treatment.

They should have to live in the squalor as they clean it. That seems to be good enough for the people of New Orleans to suffer through on a daily basis, so why can't the pop tarts and their entourage enjoy the same opportunity? Sentencing should be hard labor, 40 hours a week, for about a year or two in an area of the nation that has seen it's share of loss and devastation. No days of for a manicure or a massage. No weekends off to jet away to another cleaner location. No special foods, no personal trainer, no PR and definately NO managers. Unless we get to put the manager and the parents in on the ticket with the pop tart... that would truly be an interesting twist. Make the parents join the wayward child in cleaning up their image by cleaning up a town.
No buy - outs. No slick lawyers. And if they lawyer up, the lawyer joins them by day and does pro-bono work on the side by night for those who have lost everything in the hurricane and been robbed by the billion dollar a year insurance companies.

Maybe a stark dose of the reality of what suffering truly is would help the pampered princesses and their not so royal court to see just how pampered they really are. Even if it doesn't sink in and they return to their life of crime, the photo ops of the beautiful people dirtying their hands in the moldy remnants of the once heralded city would be a kind of penance that money can't buy.

I believe in the processes of repentance and forgiveness. But the part that is being skipped all too frequently in the equation of putting a shattered life back together is the part called 'restitution'.

You can't restore something without undergoing a major overhaul of every element from foundation to rooftop. This also applies to a person's life.

If these people are truly sincere about changing not only their life but the perceptions and beliefs about the sincerity of their purpose, they need to attach some serious financial and personal expense to the process.

Gilbert and Sullivan had it right when they said 'Let the punishment fit the crime".

Until the rich and famous feel the same intensity of punishment the great unwashed feel for the same crime, then they haven't experienced what it takes to truly make them sorry enough to desire change. Even then, the process has set backs and problems. Afterall, we are still sadly human.

But if you put the poptarts in a cell with someone who will not be impressed by their salary and Hollyweird career, it just might make an impact on them.

If it doesn't, then we can only hope and pray that the children of the world will somehow see through the phoniness and sham that is stardom and choose something better for themselves.