30 Days Season 3

Year: 2008

Grade: B+

Country: USA

Director: Spurlock

Review

this season tackles:
spurlock working in a coalmine. pretty tough gig. avg. guy gets 65k/year which is nice, but you’re digging most of the time and it doesn’t look like fun. 10+ years and you are likely to get black lung. wish we could stop depending on this stuff, but we still use it for about half our electricity. even one of the coalminers said we needed to get away from coal. my understanding is that mining doesn’t even create very many jobs anymore, either. lose-lose.

living in a wheelchair. ex-nfl DB lives in a wheelchair for 30 days. this one is obvious and i think most people have thought about it. as someone who builds stuff, i think about clearances and ramps and blocking for handlebars, etc. i’m not building my own place with curbless showers and whatnot, but i certainly have thought about the everyday pain that goes into being a para/quadrapeligic

animal rights. meat eater stays with PETA nuts. he ends up finding out about some of the bad treatment from factory farmers. the thing is, that i don’t know a single meat eater who thinks “yeah, fuck those cows, they should be raped and tortured before turned into steak.” unfortunately we have corporate farmers who don’t give a shit and give the entire carnivore nation a bad name. oh, and spay/neuter your pets!

same sex parenting. dumb woman stays with gay couple who adopted. they go at it from the perspective that there are a lot of gays who want to adopt and a lot of kids who need adopting. even that strategy didn’t work. she was very stubborn (and mormon) and didn’t budge on anything. neither did they.

guns. woman who thinks guns only do bad things stays with a guy who loves guns. this aired after the VA tech shooting and i watched it shortly after the CT shooting. in six months you could watch it and it would still be topical because we’re going to continue to have these shootings. unfortunately i think that her POV was too indicative of liberals on the issue – many think that guns are never good, guns are owned by right wing wackos, etc. the truth is that guns on the range are fine, guns for hunting (especially for rural people who supplement their income with deer meat) are not bad, guns for home protection are fine so long as properly secured. the problem is all the other guns. until we get liberals to understand that and conservatives to understand that we don’t want to rid the country of all weapons, we’re not going anywhere.

spurlock living on an indian reservation. he gets all spiritual and stuff and loves the navajo grandma who shows him how to make navajo fry bread (i’d love her too because that stuff is awesome).

Watched on TV