Image of the Day

and frankly seeing his performance we think he would simply do a better
job than the other guy, the other white patrician, wealthy guy, and that’s an
important moment in American life in terms of race; there’s no way
around that whatever one thinks of Barack Obama (and I have been quite a
critic of Barack Obama), that’s a victory and it’s an important victory for
our evolution in race, but of course it also revealed another half of the
country feels actually not very progressed in terms of race. A lot of the
antagonism towards Obama is expressed in rather thinly veiled old notions
of how to involve in race speak in American life. So that was a little
disorienting, so I will call that bittersweet.
But against that backdrop there were great positives on Election Day
that didn’t have to do with the presidential election, and I allude here to
the victories in the state of Washington, the state of Colorado and the state
of California. In Washington and Colorado we saw legalizations of
marijuana. As a maker of a movie about the drug war, that’s very
important to me because I think those victories demonstrate a certain
frailty in the system and they demonstrate a public appetite for going
about this differently, for starting to recognize that the way we’ve dealt
with drugs over the past forty years has been a disaster and that we need a
course correction. In the state of California the victory was almost more
significant because Californians as it turns out voted 68% to revise the
notorious three strikes law in California.
Prior to election day the “Three Strikes” law in California could put
you in jail for the rest of your life for a third offense that was petty or
nonviolent; as trivial as stealing a slice of pizza or stealing dental cream or
socks as one person got a life sentence for. When you see such an absurd
law as that finally get addressed by the public who voted to say,
henceforth under what was called Prop 36, California law has now been
changed. Now the third strike that puts you in jail for life has to be serious
or violent. That’s what we should think would put you in jail for life, but
that hadn’t been the case for decades and now it is the case. I think that
sends a message across the nation, not only in California (which led the
nation into draconian sentencing), that they can begin to lead us out
toward a more sane place. But for anyone who doesn’t care about the