Dope

You take away belief and equal opportunity by cutting taxes to the point where public schools become more like a prison than a lightning rod, and you wind up with the situation Malcolm (Shameik Moore) and his friends find themselves within in Rick Famuyiwa's Dope, an examination of three scholastically oriented (nerdy) misfits caught up in the harsh realities of brutal embittered hopelessness.

Remaining aloof is the key, but after Malcolm hesitantly agrees to aid a drug dealer's romantic pursuits, their lives enter the domain of high-stakes hustling, enlisting the resources of their technologically advanced connaissance to risk everything to remain afloat, buoying disparate domains, panic stricken, navigation.

Ingenuity, flexibility, impudence, sycophancy, and audacity guide their way, as they demonstrate why they're contenders, in a repressive system designed to annihilate innocence.

Agency.

Black lives matter.

The film excels at celebrating the skills immediacy engenders, while vituperatively condemning the structures which necessitate them, as gentle Malcolm's arm shakes when he pulls out the gun.

At the same time, its odd blend of the naive and the dissolute euphemizes shockingly destabilizing pressures.

The far right says, "don't complain, you're a whiner, we will do as we please and keep everything for ourselves while crushing your hopes and dreams because we find it amusing."

The moderate left diagnoses cultural maladies and finds systematic solutions, opportunities, middle classes, wealth, which it patiently introduces to ease sociocultural pressures.

These solutions aren't like ordering a pizza or buying a new pair of jeans, they take decades of sustained effort to develop, to flourish.

The far right makes them seem like impossibilities and when elected does what they can to halt their momentums.

If you think they are impossibilities, note that the social conditions in Europe and North America weren't that different from those present in many third world countries centuries ago.

The middle class is paramount.

It's not that simple of course, and human nature isn't a butterscotch sundae.

But, in Canada anyways, there's universal healthcare, many strong public schools, opportunities to learn more than one language, the possibility of a highly paid 40 hour work week which provides parents with time to spend with their children, a Charter of Rights and Freedoms, free speech, freedom of religion, collective rights, the right to vote, to work in an non-discriminatory environment, to access clean drinking water, a general emphasis on health and well-being.

These things wouldn't be present without politics.

After ten years of seeing these features severely scrutinized, perhaps it's time for a different approach.

Change.

Sustainable development.

But you can't make change if you don't vote, voting being a right that generations fought for desperately in relatively recent times.

The far right will be voting.

At least in this century we don't have to fight our way to the polls.

For a new democracy.