August 6, 2002

• Our record-breaking spell of hot dry weather finally ended, and so I am getting a day or two  off from working my stand.  As usual, I work harder on my day off than when I am working the stand.  I started by fixing breakfast for SuSu (aka Kathy) and I, then did some housework.  Now I am catching up on my blogging, then to do an e-mail or two, then more housework, to be foillowed  up with a video orgy (Jimmy Neutron, Monster Ball, and Poor White Trash).  Anyway, I want to preface my latest rant by saying that I love this country.  As a lad, I lived next to the Susquehanna River (the largest non-navigable river int he world), and had a great view of the Cumberland Gap.  Travelling through the southwest on my way to Alaska, I loved the rock formations and the elegant austere ambiance of the desert.  Here, there is so much to love I won’t even try to mention it all, but high on the list is Denali (I’ve seen him almost every day for over ten years, still takes my breath away), I love getting water from the artesian spring near our place, I love seeing a zillion stars,, and the Northern  Lights in the winter, I love driving down a dirt road and coming upon a bald eagle sitting arrogantly in a tree, and I love seeing fireweed in the summer.  (The preceding sentence would have given my freshman comp prof a heart attack, but Miss Harpster has long since gone to the great classroom in the sky, I’m sure.)

  
  

  However, I loathe and despise the goverment of this country and many of its laws.  I despise the hypocrisy of a land which routinely  criticises other countries for their civil rights failing, while having a dismal, pathetic record of its own in that department.  Most of all, Ihate this country’s penal system.  It is  a brutal dehumanizing affair, in which the only people who have a chance of getting fair treatment are rich white people. (OJ?  As far as I can see. he became an honorary white person the day he won the Heisman.)  A number of years ago, President Johnson called for a war of poverty.  Over the years, this mutated into a war on poor people.

  
  

  Here is one example: you get busted for a little bit of crack, and you get a much stiffer sentence than if you were busted for classic.  Why?  Simply because crack is mostly a drug of poor (and non-white) people, while classic (that is, regular old snortable coke) is mostly used by white folks.  Another thing–you hear about celebrity busts from time to time–when was the last time a celebrity drew hard time?  And speaking about hard time–

  
  

  This country seems to think, as a whole, that it is better to lock up social problems than it is to cure them.  On this entire earth, there are only two countries who have a greater percentage of their populations behind bars than does the US of A.  Those two contries are South Africa and the former Siviet Union.  Good company, huh?  And then there’s the death penalty.

  
  

  The Untied States (sic) is the ONLY western nation which still routinely murders its citizens who run afoull of the law.  So many death row inmates are found to be innocent (say by DNA testing, or by last-minute confessions of others) that the stories no longer even make the headlines.  What could be more horrible–with the possible exception of being buried alive–than being an innocent on death row, counting the days until someone straps you down and a doctor (a doctor!) coldly and deliberately injects poison into your veins?  This is surely cruel, but not unusual, so I guess it must be constitutional.

  
  

  Another way this country is fubar is in the drug laws, which I already touched on.  There are upwards of a million people behind bars for breaking pot laws.  And how is this for hypocrisy–despite the fact that it is possible (if you are fairly well-off and well-connectewd) to get permission to grow your own pot to releive certain medical symptoms, under the law (“the law is a ass, a idiot”–Dickens), marijuana is a Class 1 Narcotic (Calss 1 means drugs with no recognized medical use.  This, to put it tersely if vulgarly, sucks.  It sucks doggie dicks yay long and yay big around.  And even if you have no compassion for the million of so folks in durance vile (which in past years included SuSu and moi), maybe the fact that it is costing society roughly FIFTY BILLION DOLLARS to keep these folks imprisoned will get your attention.  And for a drug which has never killed anyone,and which tends to discourage users from getting violent (or from getting much of anything else done, to be fair about it).

  
  

  A wiser man than I once observed that America is the only country which went from being primitive to being decadent without ever having been civilized.  He was an optimist.

  • 4:04 pm
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