America: the land of the free and the home of the brave, the global police force, and the beacon of hope for all nations. America is supposed to be the great nation that does not do the bad things that all the not so great nations do. America does not abuse the poor or the destitute. Our government does not wage war against its own people. We do not have crooked cops or policemen… or do we?

If you have not seen the documentary series “Making a Murderer,” you need to. I say that not because of its cliffhanger endings or artful buildup of suspense, I say that because it shows what really goes on in America. As I outlined above, most of us live in a world of blissful ignorance where the American government is full of incorruptible officials who carry out their job with the utmost integrity. We believe this because that is what we are told. We may not experience the law first hand on a daily basis, so we just assume that the people in charge are good and that they are doing their job with the utmost integrity. A large majority of middle-class Americans live their lives comfortably and unbothered. They do their taxes, raise their children, and fulfill whatever niche society has laid out for them. It is not so with the lower class. One particular quote struck me. Steven Avery told his parents, “Poor people lose. Poor people lose all the time.” When he says this, he is in jail with no ability to be released on bond and an impending trial with the deck stacked against him. He is right. Poor people lose all the time. Yet we live in America, the land of opportunity and equality.

My claim is that we may not live in a country as great as it seems. If you are born into a middle class family with ample economic and educational support, yes, you live in America, the land of opportunity. But if you are born in the inner city to a single mother working a minimum wage job, you are not living in America, you are living in a prison. You live in a prison in a sense that you will never be able to leave. Your school isn’t good enough to get you into college, and even if it were, you would have no money to get there. The people around you don’t support you; they have enough problems of their own to worry about. You search for acceptance, some way somehow, and oftentimes your search for acceptance leads you down a path not towards success, but towards violence and crime, and you will end up in a literal prison. You are born into the world with a full deck stacked against you, and the government, which is supposed to look out for you and protect you, watches you like a hawk for the day you mess up, so they can take you and remove another troublemaker from the streets. America: the land of opportunity.