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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. AnonymousDecember 9, 2011 at 6:19 PM

    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

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