Freedom is a place to lie down

We treat dead bodies better than actual people in this country, and that’s fucked up.

Graveyards creep me out. I simply do not understand why you would preserve a dead body, spend thousands of dollars on caskets to slow the process of decay, then bury them in the fucking ground. 

The burying part I get. Even the burying them in a special place. Corpses are hella gross and a MAJOR health hazard. By choosing a plot of land, usually slightly outside of town, and burying all the dead in that one place, ancient man significantly improved community health.

It’s the embalming and the watertight caskets that bug me. But Mae, you gasp, don’t you want your loved ones to rest in peace? And my answer is, not the dead ones!

A dead body is a dead body is a dead body. It doesn’t fucking care where you put it. Funeral rites are for the living. And funeral rites are incredibly important. They help with the grieving process. A community that can grieve freely is a healthy community. But a community that prioritizes the dead over the living is nothing but toxic.

The thing that bugs me is that everywhere I look I see land specifically designated to allow bodies that haven’t held a soul for decades to have an “eternal resting place.” Dead bodies aren’t meant to be eternal.  They’re meant to break down into their natural elements and return to the earth and the cycle of life.  The need to “preserve” the dead is a new thing in the course of human existence, and it weirds me out.¹

But I seem to be alone in this, as everywhere I look I see thriving funeral homes charging living people thousands upon thousands of dollars (that most of them don’t have to spend) to provide their loved one with a nice “resting place.”  And the social pressure to provide someone with a nice funeral cannot be overstated.  Meanwhile there are thousands upon thousands upon thousands of living, breathing human beings in a state of perpetual torture because the capitalist machine chewed them up and spit them out and this country is so fucking HEARTLESS that we simply refuse to give them any place to go.

We don’t just have laws against homeless encampments, oh no. Many, many cities have ordinances that make it ILLEGAL TO LIE DOWN IN PUBLIC. Seriously, not even on a fucking park bench. That’s all well and good if you have a private space to lie down in. If you don’t, well, fuck you I guess.

Human beings can’t live very long without sleep. It’s a basic scientific fact. Miss too much sleep, and your brain starts shutting down. Miss more, and there goes your body, too. You can LITERALLY die from lack of sleep. Which is apparently what you have to do to lie down with any dignity around here.

I’ve started doing research into the rights afforded to homeless people in this country. Unbeknownst to many, myself included, back in 2019 a three-person panel in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit issued a ruling in a case called Martin v City of Boise, 920 F. 3d 584 (9th Cir. 2019), CERT FUCKING DENIED, held that bringing criminal charges against a homeless person for sleeping in a public place when they had no indoor accommodations available violates the Eighth Amendment’s proscriptions against “cruel and unusual punishment.”

Now, the Cruel and Unusual clause doesn’t get trotted out much, seeing as how this country still thinks it’s perfectly okay to execute people, so this decision came as a bit of a surprise for me. Naturally, I am now compelled to chase it all the way down and see what other courts are doing with it. Is it possible the judicial system is not entirely lost? Is it possible that there remains some smidgen of a soul in some courthouse somewhere that remains loyal to the people of the United States instead of the corporate overlords who enslave them? I’ll let you know what I find out.

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1. Yes, I am aware the ancient Egyptians started preserving bodies over 5,000 years ago. I’m also aware that modern humans have been around for about 160,000 years. So, yeah, embalming is relatively recent in the course of human events. ↩︎