30 Days

[Note: Update below.]

Folks,

I've mentioned before, but there's a show called "30 Days", and I couldn't feel more strongly that everyone should be watching it.

While I have read some of the descriptions of upcoming shows that don't sound as socially important, the three I have seen so far absolutely are.

So far, I've seen:

• One in which a "good ol' boy" spends 30 days living with a gay roommate in San Francisco. It should be hard for anyone to come away from that one without a little bit less of an opinion that gays are evil and should have no rights, or to think that somehow gay marriage is even important enough to be on the radar screen
• The premiere, in which the producer and his fiancee move to a city in Ohio (I think it was Ohio, anyway) and try to live on minimum wage for 30 days. Amazing to watch. As with most minimum wage jobs, neither of their jobs carried insurance. The show's producer ended up taking a second job, just to sqeeze by for the month. During the course of the show, each of them got sick (she got sick, he got injured doing his manual labor job) and it was amazing watching them try to figure out whether they could afford a doctor, how to get treated, etc. Nine years since the minimum wage went up, and the purpose of the law (to make sure that anyone who works can at least live above the poverty line) is no longer being met.
• The first one I saw, and in current times still the most important, in which a devoutly religious Christian man from West Virginia goes to live for 30 days as a Moslem in the American city with the largest Moslem population in the U.S. Anyone who still thinks Moslems are evil, or that Islam is any more inherently evil than Christianity, really needs to watch this show.
• Whoops, I initially missed one. I also saw one episode taking a quintessential consumer couple and making them live 30 days on an eco-commune type community, living off of the land, etc. I forget this one because I really rather hated the woman of the couple. She was so totally self absorbed. For example, throughout the whole thing, she was incensed that he (a 6 foot plus bodybuilder type) was more concerned with finding some meat to eat than that she couldn't use her hair spray. Let's see, he's trying to sustain a massive body on rabbit food (not easy to do, based on the looks of everyone who lived in the community full time) and literally slowly starving, she's got a hair or two out of place, but yet she's convinced HE'S selfish because he can't see her need.

Anyway, I just wanted to mention that. There does seem to be a "fluff" show coming up, in which apparently a mother of a teen daughter for 30 days lives the hard partying college life, I guess with the hope that either the daughter will see how stupid the life is, or the mother will stop harping on her daughter.

But the three I've seen so far... there's an old saying about walking a mile in a man's shoes before you criticize him. I think most Americans would do well to follow this advice. And if you can't do it yourself, the next best thing is to watch someone else do it, and open your mind to the possibility that the journey that person goes through, the conclusions they come to, might be yours as well.

Liam.