Skip to main content

How to Drive a Person to Drink

Ken Burns' documentary on Prohibition showed how it is possible for idealists to take a bad situation and turn it into something awful.  There is no doubt that in the years preceding Prohibition, some people drank themselves stupid, beat their wives and children, and pissed themselves into poverty.  But the attempt to ban alcohol altogether turned the whole country into a nation of criminals, not just because they continued to drink, but because law itself became a joke.  They even had a name for themselves:  "scofflaws"!  Prohibition made the Valentine's Day Massacre almost certain to come.

His documentary also showed how easy it is for religious zealots to crawl into bed with really hateful people.  Banning alcohol was not just a crusade against drunkenness.  It was a white, Anglo-Saxon war against blacks, Catholics,  Germans. and immigrants generally,   It allowed haters to sound moral while lashing out at people they feared and despised.

It still happens.  It always still happens.

People want to build a fence along our southern border "to stop drugs and illegal immigration".  They pretend that all those immigrants are carrying water jugs filled with dope.   The fence is a laughably stupid idea, but even if it worked, what would be the result?  Not enough agricultural workers.  Not enough gardeners, and housekeepers, and nannies, and roofers and factory workers.  Not enough young people with ideas, who want to work and go to school.

It isn't about drugs.  It is about Catholics with brown skins.  It is about people who speak a different language.  It is about multiculturalism.  So fundamentalist Protestants people crawl into bed with racists and religious intolerants, and praise God, and say that good fences make homogeneous neighbors.

It still happens.  It always still happens.

The Defense of Marriage Act is not about defending marriage.  If it were to pass, the result would not be to strengthen marriage.  It would be to force people who want to live together to break the law.  It would be to deny a significant part of every normal population a place.  A Catholic or Protestant fundamentalist control of marriage would only force people to become scofflaws, because the law would be stupid, as Prohibition was.  Anyway, it isn't about defending marriage.  It is a hatred toward gays, and anybody whose definition of marriage is not fundamentalist.  Our kids and cousins and friends would have to become criminals.

Throwing people into jail because they smoke pot, or sold pot, is not about smoking or selling pot.  It is about young black men smoking or selling pot.  It is not about students at Yale smoking or selling pot.  It is not about the brownies your leftover-Sixties sister-in-law brings to a party.  It is about young black men who do not have any reasonable way to find a job.  That is why our jails are filled with at least two generations of young black men.  It isn't because our society is about to be destroyed by booze, or pot.

It is a case of the cures being worse than the diseases.  It is about shallow understandings of what the problems are.  It is about wanting to establish a puritanical society, or a religious country, or a Caucasian kingdom.

It is enough to drive a person to drink!  A legal drink.

Comments

  1. I SMOKE POT!
    Woohoo IM A SCOFFLAW! HAHAHA!
    SCOFF SCOFF SCOFF!

    /me scoffs off into the sunset.

    I enjoyed your very intelligent point of view on this matter.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...

AT YEAR'S END, 2014

Ah!  There you are!  And so are we! After more than thirty years, sometimes Mari and I look at each other and say how surprising it is that we have found each other.  It often happens when we have decided that neither one of us wants to go adventuring: you know, to the grocery, or to a movie; or least of all, to a party designed to disguise gravity, deny arthritis, and display bottomless good humor. At the same time, sometimes Mari and I look at each other and say how surprising is everything that has happened to us.  The world we grew up in has gone, and now there is another, and that we are still here, as we were, and altogether new. It is Jao we are thinking of. This year, more than any other in our lives, has been the year when a grandchild has occupied a significant portion of our ordinary lives.  We have, in our various ways, come to have several grandchildren, but this time one of them has lived so nearby that we could walk to where he...