Angie. 27. Latina (Mexican/Salvadoran)
I like dumb funny stuff, social justice, TV show obsessed, learning about new cultures and all the beauty they have to hold.
Pretend, for a moment, that you’re an 18-year-old teenager from a family living below the poverty line.
One day, you make a silly mistake and get a ticket for it. Nothing major - maybe you rode the subway without a ticket or smoked too close to the entrance of a building. Maybe you were loitering. Either way, one thing is for sure: you definitely don’t have the money to pay the ticket.
So you don’t.
Eventually, you miss the deadline to pay your ticket, and you get a letter in the mail that says you have to go to court. But your life is chaotic, and a court date for a missed ticket is the least of your concerns. Your family moves constantly, which disrupts your life and puts you behind in school. You have one disabled parent and one parent who is always working, leaving you to raise your younger siblings by yourself. You have no means of transportation. There is rarely any food in the cupboards. The utilities are constantly getting shut off. The week that you were supposed to go to court, your family gets another eviction notice, your cousin ends up in the hospital, and your parent finds out that their disability payments are being reduced.
So you miss your court date.
Since you missed the court date, you automatically lose your case - now you have no hope of arguing your way out of the ticket, which you still can’t afford to pay. You can do community service hours instead of paying, but you don’t have time to do that, now that you have to work part-time and odd jobs on top of everything else to keep your parents off the streets and your siblings out of foster care. You know that you probably won’t finish high school on time, let alone fulfill your hours. You might be able to explain your circumstances to the judge, but you have no idea how to go about doing that now that you’ve missed your court date, your literacy skills are years behind thanks to your constant game of school roulette, and even though legal help is available to you, you don’t know how to access it or if you can afford to do so. But that’s still the least of your concerns - since you missed your court date, the judge has also charged you with failure to appear.
Which means you now have an active warrant out for your arrest.
And just like that, you’re now a part of the criminal justice system. A silly mistake that a middle-class teenager could have solved with Mommy and Daddy’s chequebook in a single afternoon has caused you weeks or months of stress and headaches over a process you don’t fully understand, and has ended in criminal charges. Instead of having a funny story to tell over dinner when you come home from college next Thanksgiving, you are now facing additional fines (that you still can’t pay), the possibility of a couple of nights in jail, the possible suspension of your driver’s license, and the possibility of being taken into custody any time you interact with the police. The next time your parent comes home drunk and violent, or someone breaks into the house, you think twice about calling the cops - you now have to decide if every emergency is “worth” the possibility of being hauled off to jail. And in the meantime, the circumstances that caused that first mistake haven’t gone away - you still don’t have the money to pay for the subway, you are still more likely to live in a house filled with smokers, you still can’t afford quit-smoking aids, you still live in a chaotic household that deeply affects your mental health, and you still don’t understand the legal system or who you’re supposed to talk to for information and resources.
So while those other teenagers get to go through life believing that they were “good kids who sometimes made silly mistakes”, you now get to go through life thinking of yourself as a criminal. And that might be the most damaging thing of all.
When I worked with homeless teenagers and young adults, I saw this process play out again and again and again and again. The kids often considered themselves “criminals” or “bad kids” because they had arrest warrants and criminal records, but few of them had ever actually committed a serious or violent crime - the vast majority were simply unlucky kids who did something stupid and didn’t have the skills or resources (or wealthy parents) required to get them off the hook. I had classmates in my upper-middle-class high school who did far worse things with far fewer consequences, because Mommy was a lawyer or Daddy was an RCMP officer, and some of those kids grew up to be lawyers or police officers themselves. The kids I worked with never got that opportunity. Second chances cost money, and the difference between a “crime” and a “mistake” has less to do with the offense, and more to do with the circumstances you were born into.
So when we’re talking about crime, punishment and who is “worthy” of being helped, maybe keep that in mind.
Y’all act like this is some kind of hypothetical but if I don’t give my county $228 by Monday they’ll issue a warrant for my arrest.
If you’re poor it is SO SO SO easy to become a “criminal” for it. And we know this overlaps with many other forms of oppression.
Where’s that post that explains this succinctly? Oh right:
I mentioned this in tags I made earlier but I thought I’d also make a post about how amazing it is that almost every single song from the moment that Phillip Carlyle shows up on his screen is used to propel his relationship with Anne Wheeler forward. As per usual there are a lot of gifs and none of them are mine.
“The Other Side” ends with Phillip literally going to ‘the other side’ and seeing Anne for the first time and falling in love with her at first sight.
Phillip reaches for Anne’s hand during Jenny Lind’s performance of “Never Enough” when Jenny sings “Take my hand/Will you share this with me?”
Phillip drops Anne’s hand when his parents (I think) look at them and Anne responds in “This is Me” by looking up at him, giving him the death glare, and singing “I’m not scared to be seen/ I make no apologies/ this is me”…it’s also interesting to notice that at this moment Anne is on the ground and Phillip is high above her…this is another visual reminder of the social divide between them.
“Rewrite the Stars” sums up their whole relationship and has Phillip trying desperately to be with Anne who is constantly out of his reach and Anne sadly walking away from a possible future with Phillip because she thinks it’s impossible for them to be together.
Anne sings “Rewrite the Stars” to Phillip when she waits at his bedside hoping and praying that he’ll come back to her.
At the end of “From Now On”, Phillip wakes up when the lyrics say “From now on/ from now on/ home again” signifying that they are each other’s home and as long as they have each other they can get through anything and Anne kisses Phillip for the first time.
During the reprise of “The Greatest Show” Anne and Phillip sing, “‘Cause everything you want is right in front of you/ And you see the impossible is coming true/ And the walls can’t stop us (now) now, yeah”. They’re together and they’re happy and what they thought was impossible has become a reality.
I cannot thank Pasek and Paul and the writers of this movie enough for all of the careful thought and planning they did when it came to Anne and Phillip’s romance.
Thank fucking god for plumbers who are willing to go behind their corporate bosses’ backs and be like “yeah don’t pay the 150 dollar emergency fee just gimme 40 bucks under the table, also, don’t buy a water heater from us, my boss will charge u like 800 bucks. go to Lowe’s and ask for a Scratch n’ Dent, they’ll give you for like 200 bucks. Call me tomorrow and I can install it for you in like an hour” wow… solidarity
I cannot express how much I would rather slip one workperson 40 bucks directly into their pocket for doing me a solid by not making me get ripped off by his bosses, like…….. thanks bro
