sad and angrymaking

i was just looking at youtube things (as one does) and i came across this:




go ahead, i'll wait.

how far did you make it into this before your ears started to steam?

i managed to watch the whole thing, getting progressively sadder and angrier for the whole forty minutes.

so the basic premise is they take five poor and desperate women and make them tell their sad stories for entertainment purposes and then they give one of the "lucky" contestants the thing she asked for plus some fabulous prizes!

there's so much wrong here that it's a little hard to unpack.

say you're poor. you're poor and you're desperate and you want simple things to make your life better so maybe you and your kids don't starve and so you get dressed up and you tell your story on national television where a kindly host makes light entertainment out of your misery. maybe you'll get that hospital gurney and transistor radio for your polio stricken son or enough construction materials so that your four kids don't have to sleep all in the same bed.

but when you win your fabulous prize package at the expense of your dignity, voted on by applause meter in the audience who appear to be petty middle class ladies who get to sit in judgement over which of you is most deserving of having some basic needs met, the other four candidates have to face the reality that they have gone begging on national television and been judged not worthy.

the other four candidates will be sent home with an iron and some perfume and some laundry soap and consider themselves lucky.

you can see the pain on the faces of these women.

i notice it's formatted to be just women going begging.

i also notice that many of the prizes in the package are stoves and freezer chests and automatic laundry machines and other things designed to help women DO WOMEN'S WORK but doesn't really address the underlying inequality, poverty, or lack of medical care.

then again, these days we seem to have television shows that are pretty much just people behaving badly for the camera.

i am all out of ideas.