Tag Archives: legalize

Good Word of Mouth

Posted by XperDunn on

 

Tuesday, May 21, 2013                   8:52 PM

 

(paintings by Correggio)

adorati

 

I’ve been stumped for writings lately—maybe I’ve finally run dry of grumpy-old-man-op-ed essays—who knows? I’d actually like that, I think… I only write those things because I want to expel the bile that festers at my brain when I see intentional stupidity and intentional harm. I’m no cynic—the people that own everything are intentionally making our lives worse—intentionally widening the gap between the haves and the have-nots.

allegory

What’s worse is, we help them do this—every time we take a paycheck to look away—supporting a family is no excuse, it only makes it worse, since we are destroying the society they will inherit, while we collaborate in the name of ‘supporting them’. What is the answer? When an entire town is centered around a military complex, what do we do with those townspeople when The Base gets abandoned due to budget cuts? Do we keep it open for the sake of the town? That only sounds correct to the townspeople, god bless’em. Does the government simply walk away, and leave the gutted town to turn ghost in their wake? That sounds wrong to everybody. So, we see at once that simple solutions are not to be had. What do we do?

cupid

Do we go out and protest in public? To me, that always seemed like giving too much power to the opponent—telling them to act, instead of us acting on our own initiative—though I suppose the media attention (if you could catch it, and for as long as it lasts) would be valuable. We’d have to come off as the ‘good guys’ on camera, though—and pissed-off people rarely look like ‘good guys’, at first glance.

day

Sensible people might point out an obvious solution—enact a program of decommissioning an entire ‘economic zone’, not just the Base it once supported. Find (or Found) businesses that are a good match with the town’s focal skill sets. In areas where closing the Base means total evacuation (say mid-desert, like) then enact a program to place the townspeople in other towns still operating as theirs once did. It would still be a breakup of the community, but it doesn’t have to be an economic disaster as well. Letting a whole town full of people go dead broke will cost a lot more, in the long run, than helping them transition to new homes and new jobs.

danae

But all you sensible people out there know the chances of that course of action—none to little. So let’s think about political solutions that approximate the sensible solution. The last two days in Oklahoma have seen recording-breaking tornados (in both size and wind-speed) that devastated communities in Tornado Alley. So we liberals may enjoy the very bleak comfort of saying ‘I told you so’ to the climate-change-deniers, but down in Okie country the praying has been non-stop—the people there have put their faith in the lord—and so cannot be harmed. That explains why they would choose live in an area called ‘Tornado Alley’.

adoratio

I just know we could be doing all of this stuff so much better if there were better people in politics—but I’m damned if I’m gonna spend time with those nut-jobs. That’s why we need young people in politics—we used to insist on old people because our elders tended to know more than the rest of us. I’m getting into ‘old guy’ territory myself these days—and I can assure you, the people my age and older are as likely to be swamped by the Future Shock Wave that is remaking the globe as they are to have depths of wisdom–which applied to an earlier, pre-internet age—and so may no longer have any relevance to our present times, anyhow!

duomo

Only the young guys and gals can even appreciate these new fulcrums of power, and the consequences of blindly trying to do business in the past. Plus, younger men and women are less ‘free for the purchasing’ than old cronies whose lives have always been defined by business. Today’s global business is a threat to humanity—soon, a tiny group of uber-bankers will own the entire world—and us with it, since we’ll all need to make a living.

duomo2

In the old days, when America and Big Business were synonymous, the famously quoted ‘business of America—was Business’. But that is no longer true. The business of International Mega-Corporations is ‘Business’—the business of we Americans has become ‘fighting a rearguard action against global corporate culture in an attempt to resume control of our own government’. That’s the new business of America.

mad_geor

I’m tired of being proud of my country—it’s that right-or-wrong business—there is so much wrong with our society, our industry, our quality of life, and our Freedom from Fear—and then up pops these Tea Party people-Doh! You know, if the Cold War was still ongoing, I’d be sure that the Tea Party was a fifth-column action to make a nonsense-of-shouting out of what were once the Founding Documents, to turn Freedom of Expression on its head by using it as a shield against those who accuse them of hate-speech—and using Freedom of Religion to suggest that it implies their particular faith is the Default Faith for the whole country.

leda

Their ignorance is epic—but that’s OK, cuz they don’t hold much stock in all the edjicashun nonsense, no how. They are a tremendous threat to our nation. They are the pawns of folks like the Koch Bros. and they even act against their own self-interest—when that runs counter to whatever mind-boink of a narrative cheerleaders like Sarah Palin are feeding them through the mass media they all despise so indignantly—it’s pure stupid, and hold the rest, out there in Tea Party land.

scodella

So I’ll be happy to be proud of my country when we start taking it back from the private interests of the super wealthy. I think we should start by refusing to respond to any TV or internet advertising—let’s all agree that we’ll only vote for a candidate when someone we trust gives that candidate a good reference. We should all unite in refusing any electioneering from anyone we don’t know and respect. Word of mouth will be the only criteria that we will base our decision on. And we disqualify all of the incumbents just to make it a clean start. (If we lose a good congressperson, we’ll come to re-elect that person, in time—but we must sand the floor before we slap on the new paint.)

m_scala

A total re-boot of federal representation via word-of-mouth may result in something more democratic than the moneychangers we endure today—but even if it doesn’t work, they’ll do no less than the last decade of blockage -and- it’ll keep the crooks busy enough to slow their insatiable greed.

io

Word of Mouth Only! Word of Mouth Only!

Chant it with me now—

 

Word of Mouth Only! Word of Mouth Only!

Info Wars

Posted by XperDunn on
Bacchus

Bacchus (c. 1596)
-by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio [September 28th, 1571–July 18th, 1610]

An informed electorate is necessary to a functioning democracy. The freedoms of assembly, of speech, and of the press are included in our rights because we must have debate and a free exchange of ideas before we can make an informed choice of one candidate over all the others. And we need to know not only about the candidates but also about the conditions of our own nation, state, county and community.

We must be kept informed. When years ago the tobacco industry fought court battles over their liability for smoking victims—and against anti-smoking legislation, they hid internal memos and reports from the courts that had a bearing on all those cases. Once that information was made available to the public by tobacco industry whistle-blowers, the industry continued to fight for the suppression of that information. But information has power—the tobacco industry’s efforts to sequester that now-public information was short and sweet—where their original secret-keeping strategy stymied health and safety advocates for years, even decades.

Even more troubling is the issue of ‘Big-Pharma’ cherry-picking which drug studies are kept confidential and which are made public—there have even been instances where some studies’ key data were kept confidential while the otherwise positive study-results were made public! And we should remember that the same sort of hard-working chemists who invented children’s aspirin also invented the gas-canisters for Nazi death chambers—that is, just because they make medicines, that doesn’t make their corporations good for our health.

Car manufacturers have had scandals which publicly exposed their manipulation of data to obscure bad car parts and design flaws that would otherwise force them to issue very expensive recalls on well-respected car brands. And it is a fact that these corporations shamelessly make calculations based on the cost of liability lawsuits compared to the cost of the recall—and when car-buyers being injured or killed is the less expensive of the two, that is the course they will follow.

I hesitate to bring up HMOs and shoddy health insurance ethics—their depraved indifference to their customers has been fodder for many a thriller’s plotline, to the point where we are numb to their disgraceful lack of ethical conscience. However, in all such instances, keeping some data secret (or falsely representing data) plays a large role in allowing these corporate pirates to continue unimpeded and unpunished.

The Catholic Church is also guilty of keeping horrible secrets with regard to their nuns’ and priests’ behavior in their diocese. At times in our more recent history we have found the Office of the Executive also being less than forthcoming.

We hear of banks foreclosing on solvent mortgages in good standing—and, in a twist, we find that this is a problem due to their inability (or lack of interest) in going over the mountains of data represented by their thousands upon thousands of mortgage loans. No one could be bothered to read it all—the vast majority of them were bad credit (just the way they had sold them) so they just foreclosed on all of them, ignoring the lone few who had actually made an honest go of their home investment, and made their payments on time.

Equally mind-numbing tsunamis of printed data confront everyone who wishes to be kept informed of our legislative process—bill-proposals with page-counts requiring hand-trucks (that’s plural) to deliver a single copy are the norm. Even the legislators can’t make time to re-read their own ‘product’—they get synopses from legal aides who spend days poring over the verbiage, trying to whittle down these paper mountains into digestible spoonfuls.

Now we are told that NRA lobbyists have successfully blocked the CDC from including ‘gun violence data’ in their reports on health and safety. This is a new low—the lobbyists for the arms industry are actively legislating against free speech—shamelessly advocating the suppression of the truth from the electorate.

4:11 PM

I took a break and watched some TV. The entertainment industry is the worst when it comes to dishonesty—and I guess it is their stock-in-trade, after all. I have watched a documentary that Cablevision has listed as a documentary released in 2012. I come back here to say a few words about it and—what do-you-know!—iMDB says the documentary was actually released in 2008. I’ve also had this problem with printed fiction (novels, that is) when they slap a new cover on something 15 years old and sell it to me as if for the first time—until I start reading it, and then feeling a little too familiar with the story, and then checking my two-car library to see the same damn book, bought in 1995! But with science fiction, fifteen years is old (with a capital O)—and by the same token, a film documentary should have the correct date label, as if they were newspaper editions. What’s a documentary for if it isn’t giving us new information?

So anyway, I’ve just seen this 2008 documentary, “Kiran Bedi : Yes Madam, Sir” which chronicles the career of Kiran Bedi, who became India’s very first female Police Officer in 1972. She (and they have ‘stills’ of this) faced down a sword-wielding Delhi mob (from which the rest of her fellow officers were retreating) alone, with a police baton in her hand. As she continued to serve she ran into an unethical system. But she didn’t just refuse to participate in the endemic, well-entrenched corruption—she wouldn’t acquiesce to it, either.

Her superiors felt (and still felt comfortable, as of the documentary’s making in 2008, to repeat their unfounded allegations) that she was rocking the boat, and she was sent to be Inspector General of the Tihar Jail, a notorious pit of a prison, at that time, in which she was expected to fail completely. Bedi instantly implemented prison reforms that included mass meditations with no guards present. She started a daycare/school for the prisoners’ children, who lived in the prison with them until age six. She transformed a prison system into an Ashram, but she is hounded from the post, re-assigned as IG to a more rural region. After being dishonestly besmirched by her political and civil enemies, she is sent to run an infamous police training academy, which produced virtually untrained fodder for the existing chain of corruption—and which she also transforms into an Ashram.

Her well-trained, spiritually enlightened recruits began to cause friction with the ‘status quo’ police forces they joined upon graduation. Her enemies were determined to ruin her reputation and drove her from the training academy. Then she is awarded the Magsaysay Award, Asia’s ‘Nobel Peace Prize’ for idealism and integrity in public service, in 1994. She was chosen by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan as UN Civilian Police Advisor in 2003. Since then she has seen her critics forced to withdraw all their false allegations and her government has officially recognized her humanitarian programs and reforms.

What a gal, as they used to say. What an incredible champion for truth and justice!

I saw another documentary a few days ago—“Pink Saris” (2010)—this Indian woman, Sampat Pal Devi, goes to the homes of mistreated girls and young women trapped in prostitution and publicly admonishes the men who are abusing these girls—whether their fathers or their husbands or their uncles—insisting that they be decent human beings in their treating with the females of either the family or the brothel; that they let their daughters go to school, that they stop practicing domestic sexual abuse against the women, which the police turn a blind eye to—and then this incredible lady excoriates the policemen who are standing around doing nothing, telling them they should arrest this husband or father or pimp.

She blatantly shames these losers—and the camera catches the truth in their faces—that they know they are doing wrong. The women she wrests away from the pimps are all given pink saris to wear– Sampat Pal Devi makes them all members of the Gulabi (‘Pink’) Gang.

But my most favorite is a Pakistani girl, Malala Yousafzai, from the Swat valley. Responding to the recently-empowered Taliban’s forbidding education for girls in 2009, this little eleven-year-old, at the wish of her father, Ziauddin, became a public speaker for women’s literacy and an activist advocating women’s education. Her speaking out for women’s rights brought attention throughout her country, not only in the issue, but in her, personally. In October of 2012, Taliban would-be assassins hijacked her school bus, where one of them climbed aboard, looked for her, and shot her twice, in the head and neck. They ran off immediately and she was very close to a hospital at the time—a main reason for her survival—and she has since been flown to Great Britain for surgery. She is almost fully physically recovered now (one photo showed her sitting up in her hospital bed and reading) and I take great pleasure at the thought of the humiliation those Taliban bastards must feel.

And so, we see that we are in a global information war—but we aren’t just fighting for access or openness, we are fighting for the truth and we are fighting against the lies. We are fighting over the legends for the pie chart graphs, for the test results the drug company was very unhappy about, for the safety of our food, our medicine, our homes, cars, children—ourselves. And some people are employed by corporations—and their job is to front for the lies and spin the truth.

We see that our schools are the assembly line of our future, deserving of at least as much funding as our military—for without a future for America, what is it our military is defending? We see that lobbyists, business leaders, and politicians are often more interested in being left to their own devices, to generate revenue, than in being a positive part of our future. We learn that enough money can turn the truth to a lie and lies into facts. We understand that power-seekers are the worst possible candidates for positions of authority. And we stand in wonder at these fearless women—each one a self-contained fighting machine for truth and justice; a white tornado of change that no amoral power-machine can withstand.

Anyway, what I started out to say was that the gun lobby’s suppression of CDC data gathering is a public monstrosity—and a far more important factor of this issue than whatever Ted Nugent has on his beer-soaked mind.

Nostalgic Self-Absorption

Posted by XperDunn on

There was a certain Christmas Eve night, back when I was still single, when I left my parents’ houseful for some night air. It was cold—and a very white Christmas—snow covered the ground and a sprinkling of fresh snow sparkled and twirled in its fall past the street lights. I walked down Edgemont Road towards the church end (my old paper route when I was little) and all the homes seemed to spill their golden glow out onto the snow-covered lawns and trees.

Even though I had just come from a crowded house full of cheery voices and drunken laughter, those other homes seemed to cast a spell of isolation upon me. It was as if the whole world was gathering into hug-fulls of holiday togetherness behind all those windows while I walked silently by on snow-padded sidewalks.

I found it hard to bear, being without a lover on such a night. It wasn’t that I would sleep alone—or, being a man, I should say it wasn’t only that I would sleep alone that night. It was more about not having someone with which to share the goodness of the celebratory eve. But the ache of it was as strong as if there were a specific woman to go with the lacking—it seemed to echo backwards in time, tolling heavily against my heart.

I’ve often felt that way since—I recognize it now as ‘nostalgia’—an ugly word compared to the ineluctable, bittersweet bliss of sorrow it signifies. It is a yearning that requires time to acquire. That first time had to have been the earliest age at which I had accumulated enough memories— encompassed a large enough timescale—to be able to feel so distant from my earlier days. And, too, I had to have been acquainted, over time, with enough personalities that I could imagine a crowd of missing consorts, friends and relatives to put up against my solitary condition, standing on a street corner in the nighttime snow-flurries of Christmas Eve.

Call me a masochist, but I always embrace such painful wistfulness whenever it arises. Perhaps our lives, while we are living them, are too much about the ‘doing’ for us to focus on the feelings of a thing. I suggest that our hindsight has the bulk of the feeling, being at leisure to examine our feelings without actually being in the middle of, say, the conversation or, perhaps, driving to a party—or whatever. We live in our moments, but we feel in our memories.

I’ve even had the strange, occasional reversal of my feelings about a past event when, having been brought to mind off and on for years, its memory suddenly shifts into the opposite of what I’d always thought had happened!

T.S. Eliot has described this experience much better than I ever could:

“Second, the conscious impotence of rage

     At human folly, and the laceration

     Of laughter at what ceases to amuse.

And last, the rending pain of re-enactment

     Of all that you have done, and been; the shame

     Of motives late revealed, and the awareness

Of things ill done and done to others’ harm

     Which once you took for exercise of virtue.

     Then fools’ approval stings, and honour stains.

From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit

     Proceeds[…]” 

— section II, “Little Gidding” (No. 4 of ‘Four Quartets’) by T.S. Eliot

So I am consoled by the knowledge that this is not a unique failing of my own, but simply a part of the human condition.

I have always been derided for acting like someone much older than my age—but I chalk this up to the fact that I’ve put on more mileage, and on rougher road, than my critics may realize. Besides, if one were to count cigarettes (and other such bad habits) as ‘taking X number of years off of one’s life’, then why can’t they be counted as ‘additional years elapsed’’ just as easily? By that measure, I’m about two hundred and twelve.

That’s counting the smoking, the drinking, the drugs, the running, the lifting, the worrying, the illnesses, the cancer, the transplant, and the work—work of years without vacation, work through weekends, work of 24 hours duration, the work on algorithms until my head was a cloud of algebra, the tensions of work in a family business—and the stress of parenthood, and the chaos of networking with the subculture that was a part of life for my generation.

But it’s more than all that—lots of people’s lives are a trip through the wringer—it’s also a matter of my being a ‘delicate flower’, easily shocked, easily tired, easily hurt, and quick to assume guilt. Loud noises create gouts of adrenalin; bright, flashing lights cause massive migraines; talkative chatterers make me dizzy with confusion. I was born a sprinter, but any extended efforts are always tortuous to me—my endurance is ephemeral. It’s not that I dislike excitement—I love to be caught up in things—it’s just that I can only take it in small doses.

Being different has always been a given—I’m not quite certain of the exact reasons other people see me as unusual. What I came to recognize, with maturity, is that everyone is unusual. As a kid, I took for granted that other people were all the same—well, they all looked at me funny—and I didn’t know much else about them. What a waste of my school years, thinking I was outside of unanimity, rather than a unique element among an entirety of ‘unique’s.

But the time is past. Whatever I want to blame on my parents, my teachers, my schoolmates, my siblings, or my business associates—that is all in the rearview, for good or ill. I’m a middle-aged man in a privileged society, supported by others, challenged by nothing more difficult than wiping my backside or picking up stuff that I drop on the floor. I’ve lost all four grandparents, my father, my aunt (his sister), one sibling, and a father-in-law. I’ve also lost many friends, some to illness, some to suicide, some to insanity. If I was ever going to relive parts of my life (as if anyone could) I am rapidly losing cast members. And those that remain are better appreciated than confronted. In short, I must take responsibility for myself—for who I am, for what I’ve been, and for whatever happens next.

There is a tragic shadow over the middle-aged—we remember old plans, erstwhile ambitions—things we meant to reach out for, but never had the time. And it isn’t until we are past the age of becoming that we clearly see that past as a golden dawn, a time when adults were eager to help us make a good start, when we were still young enough to be prodigies, when we were forgiven our lack of experience and understanding. Those privileges are for the young—we who have lived the ‘meat’ of our lives aren’t necessarily finished with living, but we are finished with beginning.

This is our burden—to know about singles bars, but be unable to hang out in one without the word ‘creepy’ being involved; to love the thought of taking college courses yet be without any chance of being an intern or junior associate after graduation. The ideal is that anyone can do anything, regardless of age. But the reality is that a mid-50s-aged law school graduate is not going to be chosen by HR personnel used to inexperienced, energetic hot-shots barely out of their teens. After 35, or 45 (I forget which) one cannot even join the army—the universal ‘plan B’ for every disadvantaged youngster.

I find my life history quite interesting—but I can never seem to write it down in such a way as to make it interesting to others. This suggests that my appraisal of my ‘adventures’ is biased and I simply don’t want to admit that my life has been unexceptional. But there is always an inner voice that tells me I just don’t write it properly. So those are my choices: I’m either living a meaningless, empty life, or I’m a really bad writer.

Happy Turkeyday, Evabody!

The Law Makes The Crime

Posted by XperDunn on

Sunday, September 30, 2012            3:44 AM

Crime-inciting Laws should be recognized for what they are. The USA went through a violent period of Prohibition and ultimately recognized that a Repeal of Prohibition was the right thing to do. The criminal distribution organizations were defanged by making their products available from a licensed liquor store.

Abortions were illegal for a long time but still happened—malpractice and unwanted children were the result. Rove v. Wade gave us the right to choose abortion, which stopped the horrors of backroom abortions and self-abortion attempts. Couples were able to plan their families—even when the Pill and other contraceptives failed to prevent pregnancies.

In both these cases, everyday citizens who found themselves in desperate straits were forced to go against the law to have a drink or to end an unwanted pregnancy. The fact that people will always seek these things, plus the fact that criminalizing these things did not prevent them from happening, plus the fact that criminals are prone to make money from these situations—all made the decision to legalize them a choice that (when all was said and done) was merely common sense.

How we have gone so many decades ignoring this common sense surrender to human nature with regard to controlled substances is a puzzle to many, myself included. Tons of money, manpower, and international cooperation have gone into the fight to keep society free of drugs—with no effect whatsoever. Anyone can get any drug—they need only ask for them from the criminals who sell them. People even grow or cook up their own drugs without too much difficulty.

Meanwhile, millions in taxes are wasted on the futile War on Drugs; billions in cash flow into the war-chests of the major drug cartels; and millions of otherwise law-abiding citizens are imprisoned on drug charges of a non-violent nature (which wastes more millions in tax money). Plus, there is the health issue—shared needles spreading disease, no help for the addicted, and no quality-control of the drugs being dealt, bought, or used. And, again, we see no change in the status quo. All that wealth, all the blood spilled, all the wasted effort—and drugs are still easily available on any street corner.

Would legalization make the problem better or worse? Well, firstly, how worse can things be? Plenty of people use illegal drugs every day. Will legalization cause an increase in their numbers? I don’t see how—anyone who wants drugs is getting drugs.

I won’t even go into the positive effects legalization could produce—they are not necessary to my argument. The drugs have won every battle in the war on drugs and they have created huge, networked criminal organizations around the world and in all the fifty states. Legalizing drugs would impact the criminal world like a body blow. The war on drugs, oddly enough, can be won by surrender.

The main difficulty is acceptance. No one wants to say, ‘Go ahead, use drugs all you want.’ But legalizing drugs is not an encouragement, but rather a freeing of drug-users from the fear and secrecy that present day drug use entails. And if it turns out that one drug, above all others, is just too dangerous to ignore we will have two advantages: 1) Other drugs can be offered as substitutes, and 2) we can better interdict a single substance than the entire spectrum of controlled substances we are banning at present.

To continue the War On Drugs is just plain stupid. It is a knee-jerk reaction to a situation that requires more thought than reflex.

Fascism and Drug Policy

Posted by XperDunn on

Veil Nebula

Wednesday, August 01, 2012         2:57 AM

Fascism Lives—And It’s Just Saying ‘No’

When Fascism first hit the world stage, it was hailed by many as an absolutism that would remove the unsightly wrinkles from our modern nations by insisting that each nation’s government had a right to categorize and control all the citizens of their nations. Today we call ‘categorization’ by its true name, ‘genocide’. We still fight governments over control of our lives, which has a tendency to creep up—but more importantly, we see few governments reversing their policies on surveillance and control—always creeping forward, but never moving back to the former, less-rigorous condition.

The governmental control over the Nazi’s lives was ultimately defeated, but it was defeated in part by America’s patriotic love of our ‘free’ way of life, which manifested itself as Americans’ willingness to cede control over their own fate and pull together to fight the enemy. Not only were military personnel expected to take orders without question—even the home front bought into the need for rationing gasoline, rationing food, blackout curfews, the Japanese-American concentration camps, metal and rubber drives, and even the presumed sacrifice of part of ones paycheck to buy ‘war bonds’ to support the government’s war activities. This was quite a different picture from the public response to the Viet Nam war, when our government’s military actions weren’t so fervently supported by its citizens.

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The modern ‘Free World’ is a more sophisticated arrangement. Firstly, while we roundly condemn any hint of genocide, we have nevertheless become a culture which clearly separates the rich from the poor, with the resulting effect of making us all 2nd-class citizens whose laws and activities are unilaterally determined by the smallest upper-class, proportionately, that history has to offer.

In this respect, western civilization has returned to fascism with but the one caveat—that we are all Jews now, at least insofar as our needs are being addressed by those in power. And I use the phrase ‘in power’ advisedly, since we can all agree that we live in a democratic nation in which no elected office-holder was given less votes than any other candidate. (Most of the time, anyhow.)

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But those in power are not these elected officials. The powerful are the super-wealthy, and the top management executives from the major corporations (domestic or otherwise), and the owners of mass-communication companies. Any one of the powerful may well be all of these things, but no one without at least one of these points of access is in a position to make a sea-change in the way our culture operates.

As a private citizen of no great notice, I will agree that I can vote for whoever I like at each and every election. But I will not concede that I am, therefore, influencing my country in any meaningful way. The candidates that make their way onto the ballots are chosen for me by both parties’ internal systems and are carefully chosen so as to play one against the other in frivolous, superficial arenas—while never brushing up against any substantive issue that might pit the citizens of our country against the wealthy-and-powerful’s established business and finance policies. The surface roils with issues of a personal nature, which entitle everyone to have an opinion, and to argue, before, during, and after any important choices are surreptitiously made for us by the ‘boys in the back room’.

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Secondly, our control over our own fate is tamped down severely by the incessancy of mass media, an entertainment industry that still pretends to inform us objectively and thoroughly. This ‘mass-media-amalgam’ has chosen to buy into the two-party democracy story-line, in an era during which neither party has done much in the way of serving the public, i.e. at a time when we need third-, fourth, even nth- party, candidates in our politics—local, state, or national. The Nazis called this ‘propaganda’. We call it ‘cable’ and pay for it every month.

Nothing is changed more than by narration. The rich and powerful decree to their enthralled news-reporting businesses what POV is to be used, and all the news is told to us as it is perceived by the powerful. No, it’s worse than that, it is couched in language that purposely presents an audience with a biased POV—not sharing the elites’ misperceptions, but misleading us as to the reality behind the news events. And while we are barraged daily with this drenching of nonsense, no substantive public debate can begin on the issues our elite would like to keep any attention from.

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Take this example. The gigantic downfall of the derivatives market was presented in the media as something that happened on the day they reported the plummeting of global markets that triggered. We are expected to believe that dedicated journalists had been haunting the offices and hallways of the executives in control of our financial institutions, and those running their corresponding governmental overseers. We are not expected to ask why none of this Credit Armageddon was reported on in the previous years, months or even days.

Here’s another example. DEA administrator Michele Leonhart recently responded to the question: “Why is marijuana bad?” with “Well, all illegal drugs are bad.” This condescension is meant to imply that all these bothersome details are above reproach, and always were, and always would be. The bitterest part of this ‘positioning’ is it’s implication that authority should not be questioned.

No, I take that back—even more embittering is that we citizens seem to stand still for them while they fit us with their ‘little peon’s’ driving-harnesses of oppression (Patent Pending). We are seeing employment figures rise by tiny increments over years of time. We are finding minimum wage employment, and being grateful for it. We have lost that American tradition of walking out on a job when our boss is too big of an ass. The only fear we need to fear is Unemployment—Liberty, sadly, takes the Silver in that race.

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Friday, August 03, 2012

8:49 PM

 

Let me come at the drug problem in a pragmatic way—maybe then I can change your mind… Are drugs dangerous? Yes. Without question. And, even, really dangerous, deadly dangerous—yes, drugs are dangerous.

Do we fear for our children’s safety? Yes, again. Yes we do. Ours are grown now, but all through middle school and high school we lived in fear of their safety. We still do, but it has become a more amorphous fear, the yang to the yin of our hopes for their success. But back in those school days—every night was a horror movie—no, a veritable Cineplex of horror movies running through our parental minds as we waited for the phone’s ring or the car’s headlights swerving across the ceiling, signifying that both of them were still breathing for one more day. And it wasn’t just drugs we feared for their safety’s sake, there are plenty of other fear-options—ask the parent of a teenager.

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To recap: Drugs are dangerous. They put our youngsters at risk every day, not to mention several types of adults—and the children they parent. It would appear obvious that drugs should be illegal. What is there to discuss?

I should like to discuss that which isn’t obvious—criminalizing drugs makes the problem worse. The drug problem has nothing to do with the law—well, no, that’s wrong—the drug problem has even bigger problems because of the law.

One of these additional drawbacks is the acquisition of great wealth by criminal organizations. The second drawback is that this black market economy is outside of both the domestic economy and the various governments’ (local, state, fed) taxation. When black market drugs are booming, none of that cash flow interacts with established businesses and NPOs. The money lost to drug lords is money that won’t be taxed by the government trying to control drugs with Customs, ATF, and DEA.

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A third drawback of criminalized drug policy is the surreptitious distribution methods that black markets require. By using secret, compartmentalized means of distribution, the destinations are unlimited—they include schools, social venues, bars, restaurants, and residential neighborhoods.

Taxed, controlled drugs sold only to adults (as with alcoholic beverages) would make the acquisition of drugs by minors more difficult. Plus, the loss of income suffered by black market drug suppliers would put them out of business, curtailing the flow of uncontrolled drugs to the ‘street and schoolyard’ locations. Plus, it would be difficult for them to match the prices on officially sanctioned drugs—so, even if they kept going, we would soon price them out of business. Their serpentine methods of harvesting, processing, smuggling, and dealing would cost far more than an aboveboard operation of the same commodity.

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We are afraid of drugs. We are especially afraid of drugs getting to our children. We want drugs to be illegal—they are too dangerous to allow the public to have legal access. It seems to make sense—but it doesn’t. What makes sense is for us to face the drug problem and stare it down. We need drug users to be visible, we need kids doing drugs to be visible, we need to treat addicts, we need to inspect the quality and purity of drugs being used. We need to study drugs as a part of our society.

Drugs are here. I could easily find a source for any illegal drug, if I wanted to. And everyone who wants to, finds a source. That drugs are criminalized doesn’t make them go away—it only drives them into the shadows where good people never look. Illegal drugs isolate the drug user from normal society—addiction isn’t treated until the most advanced condition presents them to the ER, half-dead already. And these separations of the drug-user/-abuser from the rest of us turn a mere black market into a full-fledged underground society, with pocket concentrations in the most underserved of neighborhoods.

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Would making drugs legal give our children the idea that we condone hard drugs? Not necessarily. The businesses would still have drug tests—getting a job, particularly one requiring responsible behavior, would still be out of reach for drug abusers. Traffic cops would still arrest drug abusers who drove while under the influence (just as with alcohol). Licenses, much like liquor licenses, would control the number of retail drug sales establishments and, more importantly, would be accompanied by regular inspections by the drug control authority (just as bars and nightclubs are inspected and restricted in the manner of selling and the rules of permissible customer behavior). The children themselves would be barred from any place that sells drugs or any venue that offers drugs for use, which would tell them, just as the liquor and tobacco rules do now, that these are dangerous substances that only adults can be responsible for.

But it would tell them one other, important thing—that the government doesn’t tell people what to do, even if it is dangerous. It would tell them that liberty includes the right to be an idiot—a truism that we see proved virtually daily on the news. Prohibition gave us a lesson in banned substances—it creates a criminalized society, it empowers outlaws and organized crime, and it doesn’t ever stop the flow of the commodity to market, because the market never goes away.

One other benefit would be to relieve the enormous pressure of inmates being held in prisons—releasing every non-violent drug ‘criminal’ would create a much needed reduction in our national prison capacity. I think it is high time we ‘grasped the thistle’ of drug abuse—to forgo our fantasies of a drug free society and begin the real work of having drugs in our society.

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