War No More
War No More
Originally shared by Alvin Stearns
An American's thought. With terrorists and rampage shooters in our world, maybe we could eliminate a stupid and useless war? I propose that we end our war against a concept: drugs. People and nations need enemies with an identity: Nazis and Stalinists, for example. You know, bad people who self-identity and who have dangerous, murderous ideology. We can mobilize an entire nation against those guys and feel good about it.
War on drugs? It hasn't worked. Not for the people, the nation. You can't mobilize against an idea. Alcohol and coffee are drugs, but we're not spending billions of dollars every year to militarize police departments, break down citizen doors, seize citizen assets, fund private prisons (with cushy tax breaks and profit guarantees from states, counties and municipalities) to stop the growing, processing, distribution, sale and consumption of alcohol and coffee. America tried a war on alcohol once. That war brought corruption, criminal networks, growth of armies of federal and state public servants to fight the war, and in the end America came to its senses and ended the war. The war on alcohol brought a tiny bit of good and a mountain of bad.
The war on drugs, declared in the early 1970s, hasn't made us safer, smarter, or more secure. It's militarized our police forces. It's made possible a set of laws that encourage our officials to grab the low hanging fruit--drug users, mostly the ones with darker skin pigmentation--strip them of their assets, put them into prison, and label them forever as a "bad person." It's created an arms trade, both legal and illegal, that over the decades of this war has caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of mostly innocent citizens in our nation and in Mexico. The drug war has led to a still-rising boom in the numbers of citizens in American prisons, so much so that we've figured out a way to make it profitable to lock up Americans (which should bother any thoughtful American). Does any of that seem reasonable, effective, just, and the American way? All these decades later, what has our war and the tangle of laws and its psychological and physical impacts delivered to us that we actually need, ever needed?
I think it's time to declare peace. Start to dismantle the profit-driven machinery that creates everything from police tanks to prisons to lawlessness across our borders. Divert a fraction of the money we'd spend on war toward education about drugs and treatment for addicts. As a people, take a breath. Relax. Look around. Start to fix the mess caused by our war on drugs.
It begins by feeling good that you still live in a representative democracy. So, you can talk to your elected representatives. Tell them what you think. What you feel they should work toward. If you need to know how to find your representatives, use the link: http://www.house.gov/representatives/find/
Have a nice day. And if they ever include caffeine in the war on drugs, I'm going rogue.
//
http://www.house.gov/representatives/find
Originally shared by Alvin Stearns
An American's thought. With terrorists and rampage shooters in our world, maybe we could eliminate a stupid and useless war? I propose that we end our war against a concept: drugs. People and nations need enemies with an identity: Nazis and Stalinists, for example. You know, bad people who self-identity and who have dangerous, murderous ideology. We can mobilize an entire nation against those guys and feel good about it.
War on drugs? It hasn't worked. Not for the people, the nation. You can't mobilize against an idea. Alcohol and coffee are drugs, but we're not spending billions of dollars every year to militarize police departments, break down citizen doors, seize citizen assets, fund private prisons (with cushy tax breaks and profit guarantees from states, counties and municipalities) to stop the growing, processing, distribution, sale and consumption of alcohol and coffee. America tried a war on alcohol once. That war brought corruption, criminal networks, growth of armies of federal and state public servants to fight the war, and in the end America came to its senses and ended the war. The war on alcohol brought a tiny bit of good and a mountain of bad.
The war on drugs, declared in the early 1970s, hasn't made us safer, smarter, or more secure. It's militarized our police forces. It's made possible a set of laws that encourage our officials to grab the low hanging fruit--drug users, mostly the ones with darker skin pigmentation--strip them of their assets, put them into prison, and label them forever as a "bad person." It's created an arms trade, both legal and illegal, that over the decades of this war has caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of mostly innocent citizens in our nation and in Mexico. The drug war has led to a still-rising boom in the numbers of citizens in American prisons, so much so that we've figured out a way to make it profitable to lock up Americans (which should bother any thoughtful American). Does any of that seem reasonable, effective, just, and the American way? All these decades later, what has our war and the tangle of laws and its psychological and physical impacts delivered to us that we actually need, ever needed?
I think it's time to declare peace. Start to dismantle the profit-driven machinery that creates everything from police tanks to prisons to lawlessness across our borders. Divert a fraction of the money we'd spend on war toward education about drugs and treatment for addicts. As a people, take a breath. Relax. Look around. Start to fix the mess caused by our war on drugs.
It begins by feeling good that you still live in a representative democracy. So, you can talk to your elected representatives. Tell them what you think. What you feel they should work toward. If you need to know how to find your representatives, use the link: http://www.house.gov/representatives/find/
Have a nice day. And if they ever include caffeine in the war on drugs, I'm going rogue.
//
http://www.house.gov/representatives/find
Comments
Post a Comment