What I found most concerning about this episode was that the refugee encampments, which were supposed to represent ultimate poverty, despair, and oppression, look a damned sight nicer than bad areas in San Francisco and Los Angeles today.
I guess I would call it as close to that as TV gets. I don’t think I would really describe it as nicer, certainly not a damned sight nicer, just not put together by a set designer and limited by a budget that restricted the number of extras they could hire.
Edit: they also don’t convey the scope of the problem. This homeless in L.A. goes on for mile after mile. There’s a video out there of someone driving through Skid Row in L.A. and it’s like 10 miles long. It is absolutely unbelievable to me how big the problem is.
Oh, I gotcha now. Yes, I guess it’s really just too clean, and the people too sane, which is a result of it being thrown together in under a week, on a limited budget.
Also the show is worse in some ways. They were forced into camps that they could not leave, with no medical care, limited food, no jobs/etc.
That would definitely be some peoples preference for the current homeless, forcing undesirables into internment camps instead of dealing with the issue systemically, but that was part of the horror of the “show” setup.
I just watched this episode a couple days ago. Some of it is way too applicable to current day, particularly the part about how it takes a huge tragedy for the population to realize that maybe we should make society nice for other people.
What’s astounding to me is any of us old enough to remember 9/11 remember the phrase “9/11 changed everything.” But school after school has massacres of children and it changes nothing.
I remember it well. 9/11 did change lots of things (not for the better either), but it did galvanize the nation. Now my son has to have active-shooter drills in school and we have to act like it’s normal. I guess that is new/changed.
The difference is that 9/11 was able to be channeled into xenophobia. The same can’t really happen with school shootings. The 40k mindset of hate being a valuable and limited resource hits way too close to home.
Yeah there’s there tragic undertone to the whole thing as well. It showed the underclass actually standing up for themselves rather than fighting to keep inequality in place.
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