[bellerose]

The longer I live I'm more inclined to view countries very similar to prisons. I wonder if some day people will be free of the being born into one social/psychological experiment compared to another and that's just the result of a different coordinate on what we named earth. I was lucky enough to have dual citizenship and leave the horror show of the US. I'm doubtful I would have been able to do the same if it wasn't for being born elsewhere. Facial recognition of citizens show a decline in the values that made the country great.

[oceanghost]

“ANDRÉ: . . . And when I was at Findhorn I met this extraordinary English tree expert who had devoted himself to saving trees, and he’d just got back from Washington lobbying to save the Redwoods. And he was eighty-four years old, and he always travels with a backpack because he never knows where he’s going to be tomorrow. And when I met him at Findhorn he said to me, “Where are you from?” And I said, “New York.” And he said, “Ah, New York, yes, that’s a very interesting place. Do you know a lot of New Yorkers who keep talking about the fact that they want to leave, but never do?” And I said, “Oh, yes.” And he said, “Why do you think they don’t leave?” And I gave him different banal theories. And he said, “Oh, I don’t think it’s that way at all.” He said, “I think that New York is the new model for the new concentration camp, where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates are the guards, and they have this pride in this thing that they’ve built—they’ve built their own prison—and so they exist in a state of schizophrenia where they are both guards and prisoners. And as a result they no longer have—having been lobotomized—the capacity to leave the prison they’ve made or even to see it as a prison.” And then he went into his pocket, and he took out a seed for a tree, and he said, “This is a pine tree.” And he put it in my hand. And he said, “Escape before it’s too late.”

― Wallace Shawn, My Dinner With André

[chrisco255]

I suppose to some that NYC would seem like a prison but to others they find it invigorating. The important thing is not to project your own preferences onto others. People see the world in different ways and one man's prison is another man's paradise.

[oceanghost]

I can't imagine a more ignorant and ill-considered response to such a work of art.

[hadsed]

This seems excessive. Prisons don't benefit you the same way your national or state governments do. It sounds like you're saying any kind of government or societal control is equivalent to control exerted by prisons on the prisoners. I don't disagree that the direction seems problematic but this exceptionally dramatic way of unbalanced discussion about it is just not useful (or fun).