Why I don't like Batman as a character anymore.

The other day, I opened up the YouTube app on my iPad Mini and it recommended a video to me featuring a UK-based American comic called Reginald D. Hunter who, in the clip explains that Bruce Wayne is a rich white guy who beats up street criminals and how Batman is a conservative's wet dream.

And when you stop and think about it, he's 100% right. Bruce Wayme is a disgustingly rich guy who can afford to spend millions on the Batmobile, the Batwing, the Batcopter, an endless supply of batarangs, all the equipment in the Bat Cave, and more.

Wouldn't those millions be better spent helping to fund schools in Gotham's poorest neighborhoods? Schools that could provide a good education so that kids don't grow up to be thugs like the one that killed Bruce's parents. Hell, he could fund after school programs so that poor kids have some place to go and won't get mixed up with the bad elements in Gotham. He could also fund a jobs program to help poor folks train to get jobs or HEY how about Wayne use those detective skills to find or even creat new jobs to hire those poor folks that are so desperate for work that they turn to illegal stuff?

Or, you know, he could dress up in a bat costume and beat on thugs. Which ever works better, I guess.

Seriously, I'm not a fan of Batman anymore because of this obvious truth: criminals largely exist because there are not enough legal opportunities for poor kids growing up and adults who grew up poor. The whole super-hero concept plays on the fantasy that violence against violence could make a difference when, obviously, it will, at best, prolong the violence, or even make it worse.

I know I sound like a bleeding-heart liberal, but do the math. Crime will always exist, but in tight communities with plenty of opportunities to make a good living, they put walls and gates up to keep people without those opportunities from getting in. So, if you think there isn't a correlation between money/opportunities and poverty/street-crime I think you're just plain batty.

1 in 100 Americans are in Jail

The screencap comes from the headlines of the February 29, 2008 edition of Demoracy Now (get the rest here: http://www.democracynow.org/…/headlines ). Here is the blurb so search engines can read it:

"A new report has found that a record 1-in-100 American adults are behind bars. According to the Pew Center, the prison population has grown by 25,000, even though the rate of violent crimes has decreased. 1-in-100 black women are jailed, compared to 1-in-350 white women. 1-in-36 Hispanic men and 1-in-15 black men are in jail or prison. The US has the highest rate of prisoners in the world, with more than 2.3 million people behind bars."

I think there's something seriously wrong with a society that has one-hundredth of it's population in jail. I know some people want to just blame only the individual criminals for this, saying that these people have a choice to commit crimes or not. While I agree that they do have that choice--I do wonder about a society that produces people that allows such choices to be acceptable.

I sometimes feel like we're the inverse of the Soviet Union--but in a bad way. There was a case of a Soviet serial killer. If I recall correctly, there was just one cop who was treating a string of murders as serial killings by one man. However, he got no support from authorities because "The Soviet state does not produce serial killers."

Obviously, they were in denial and I think if we only lay blame for crime at the feet of the criminals we may be guilty of the same crime the Soviet "authorities" committed.

And I'm not even going to get into the fact that minorities make up the majority of jail populations because CLEARLY it's their fault. I mean, COME ON--you just KNOW it's in their genes!

/sarcasm
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