The Tower: Prisons In Rural America Are The Bribe For Hiding The Horrors Committed Within.

“I’m rollin’ up in a big gray bus
And I’m shackled down” — The Tower by Ice-T

When I was 19 years old, I went to Dachau, the concentration camp that is famously located right outside of Munich, Germany. I will never forget the dampness of evil that possessed my body there. My experience at this factory of death and misery makes me hesitant to visit an American plantation in the South. As horrible as the Holocaust was, it did not happen to my ancestors. I found Dachau the most wretched place I have ever been. My proximately to the evil, I feel, marked me for life. Walking where men, women, and children were murdered. Families were separated. Dachau groaned to me with the despair it harbored. The sky seemed ashen. The sun refused to shine on this detestable place. I felt damp.

Quietly, solemnly, pensively walking on this land that has now been consecrated as a vigil of the cruelty of men. A monstrosity that persists as a reminder of the dangers of apathy. A vestige of the power of propaganda and a nostalgia for a time that never existed but in the minds of those who seek power. I peered through the black iron fence and saw single-family homes like the ones I grew up in. Like the one I own.

What has disturbed me the most about Dachau: on one side of the fence, an incalculable amount of human suffering was happening, and on the other side, Germans were living…