SCENE 1 (Prison cell)

TOM

I suppose my feelings about what is coming are mixed. People concentrate too much on the past, on the might-have-beens and forget about the now. The shortness of what is coming weighs heavily on your soul. Far more heavily than any notional guilt you have from your past. The first question people think of is "What did you do?" like we are stacked and stocked and graded by crimes, court and jury. No one thinks of us as people anymore. We are zoo animals, caged and paraded as an example to the children of what happens if you do wrong. We are now used as fodder for the three-ring media circus. We don't have feelings! We are monsters! The freedom of the press shows the other face. Dehumanising us, making us seem shameless. We have no place in a society as utopian as the western world. We are different, the unwashed, the guilty. "Whatever I did can't be bad compared to him!"

My whole purpose now is to be hated. There is something about that which hangs heavy over us. We all feel it, not just us here in this enclosed block, but everyone. A terrible weight of paranoia, we don't just feel the hatred we burden ourselves with though. We feel the hatred of everyone else too, a displaced sense of anger at who you are yourself.

(TOM laughs bitterly)

We aren't allowed the luxury of guilt, of insecurity. We are expected to jeer, to spit in the face of the law, to be glad that we had transgressed. A prison block like this affords it's members an exclusive culture of club cynicism. We have been abandoned, should we listen to the garbage said about us?

The reward for swallowing the guilt of a country is this room. We are the oil that allows the unpredictable, schizoid, coiled and tangled personalities that make up our society to function together. It is because of us that the stock market ticks over, that your children go to school, that you are able to fall in love. We have taken your dark side away and made it part of ourselves, we are your emotional bin.

Should we be happy at this? What does the nation think? We aren't allowed to show emotions indicative of a higher brain function. We are inferior on a genetic level, flat foreheads with knitted brow. We frown from the effort of thinking about walking. If we aren't different, worse than you, then what is the point? Everyone needs someone to bully. Humanity suffers, collectively, from the largest inferiority complex known. Wars happen because of it's hold. Prejudice, pride, arrogance are tangled through it's icy hold on your spirits. Society is regimented, 'classless' systems worst of all because the arrogance is buried until it metamorphoses under pressure into white hot, searing, painful hate. We are below the 'trailer trash', we are below the 'poofs', the 'pakis', the ones not afraid to speak out. We are the true bottom of the pile. What's wrong with a little gentle culling, pruning the wayward branches of the True way to Freedom. Wielding the law as a pair of seceteurs, trying to put order on a chaotic, seething mass of humanity.

We are trapped here, a lesson for you. Learn it, do your homework. There is no chance for a retake on this test of wills.

JAILER (VO)

Lights out!

(Lights dim)

26.06.00. Front Page

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