HOW MANY TIMES?

In the aftermath of the horrific killing of nine innocent church goers in South Carolina, a question arises and remains unanswered: How many times?  How many times will we hear about the mass shooting of innocent people and do nothing?  Why does America allow easy gun access to dangerous people? How long will the National Rifle Association continue to have a strangle grip on congress? 
While this current shooting raises other ugly issues (like racism and the confederate flag) let's look at the issue of gun control.  Groups like the NRA who oppose even the slightest kind of control point to the Second Amendment of the Constitution as the absolute bench mark of freedom.  While that amendment does say that American citizens have "the right to bear arms",  just how that was supposed to be inferred is up for debate.  Some pro gun control groups have claimed that this was only in regards to individual  states needing to have a militia.  But the NRA, or course, maintains that the country's  fore fathers opposed any limits on gun ownership.
Personally, I don't think that we can ever really know exactly what our fore fathers intended, and honestly, I don't really care.  It bothers me that some people look at our constitution the same way that fundamentalist Christians look at the bible.  Many of our country's founding fore fathers had slaves.  None of them thought that women should vote.  Were they just products of their time?  Sure, but that's just the point, times change.  There was no way that they could, in their time, foresee and understand the invention of weapons like assault rifles, not when they lived in an era of single shot flintlock weapons.  So why does their feelings about comparatively primitive rifles matter in an era of bigger, faster, deadlier guns?
Now I personally hate guns and would never own one, but I am also a realist; the American gun culture is too strong in many parts of the country for any kind of an outright ban on hand guns to work  like they have in many other countries.  There are just too many people who will refuse to follow the law, which would result in the government having to enforce it with often deadly results.
But I don't  see why every gun owner shouldn't have to get a license and register their gun the same way that we have to with our cars.  Having 16 year olds have to pass a written test and then a driving test before they get a license, which then  has to be renewed every few years seems perfectly rational.  Why can't we do the same thing with guns?  If a car driven by an unlicensed driver is dangerous, isn't a gun owned by an unlicensed owner also dangerous?
The answer that's usually given is that licensing guns would be the first step to taking them away, even though there is no proof of that.  A law banning all guns would have to pass congress, and the NRA is one of the most powerful lobbyist groups in the country, so there's little chance of that happening. 
Along with opposing even the weakest kind of gun laws, the NRA also fans the flames of fear by telling their members that whenever a Democratic president is in office, the government is just waiting to send in government thugs to take their guns away, even though the only gun control legislation that president Obama has tried to pass was a simple expansion of already existing background checks to include guns bought at gun shows.  And even that went down to defeat.  So the idea that Obama, or any Democrat wants to crack down on "law abiding gun owners" is absurd.
Equally absurd is the idea that the people of America need to have guns to overthrow the government.  The idea that a bunch of citizens with guns could storm the nation's capital and somehow defeat a president protected by the largest military in the world is laughable.  Even more ridiculous is the notion that people taking over the US government through force would be a good thing.  Just look at history: in the twentieth century there were quite a few examples of people violently over throwing their national governments all around the world.  Were any of them an improvement?  The Czars in Russia were overthrown and replaced by the Communists, which lead to the brutality of Joseph Stalin.  Batista in Cuba was overthrown and replaced with the dictator Fidel Castro.  A CIA backed coup in Iran led to the ousting of democratically elected leader Mohammad Mossadegh and the installing of the Shah of Iran, who got rid of elections; he was himself violently over thrown and replaced with the current repressive Mullah government.  And I could go on.  I think it's safe to say that Government rule through violence is generally not a good thing in the modern world, despite what the NRA says.
And don't forget, although the NRA claims to be an organization made of gun owning citizens, every year gun selling companies donate millions of dollars to the group, seeing  any limitation on gun sales as an cutting into their corporate profits.  Yes, at the end of the day the NRA opposes common sense gun laws because their major donors want to reserve the right to profit from selling guns to criminals who will use those guns to kill.  Honestly, I don't know how gun company executives can sleep at night.

MOVING FORWARD

A recent Pew Research poll shows that the number of Americans who describe their religious affiliation as "none of the above" has been consistently growing in this country in the past few years and now stands at around 20%, a growth of about 6% since 2007.  Meanwhile self identified Christians have fallen in that same time period from around 78% to 70%.  Now obviously 70% is still a pretty hefty majority, and Americans still tend to be more religious in general than most other people in industrialized nations, but a growing trend is a growing trend.  Combine these findings with a new poll from Gallup that shows that self described social liberals are now, for the first time since the poll began in 1999, tied with self described social conservatives at 31% in America, and it appears that the country may no longer be simply described as "center right" as it has been for so many years by the media.
And this trend doesn't seem limited to America: recently Ireland became the first country in the world to allow gay marriage by popular vote (and that vote wasn't even close, with 62% of Irish voters voting in favor of it), adding Ireland to the 18 other countries where it was already legal.  Even the reelection of prime minister David Cameron in England shows how the world has moved: he was a conservative candidate who supported gay marriage, fighting climate change, and cutting taxes for minimum wage workers.  Add to that the often openly progressive views espoused by the recently elected Pope Francis, and it appears that there really is something in the air.

The Emerald Isle goes Rainbow

As a progressive non believer, I'm very happy with the way the first world seems to be going these days (although I wish the US would catch up to our European allies on issues like health care and climate change), but I do often wonder why this trend has begun.  Part of it, I think, is simple human evolution: as we find out more and more about the universe, as technology and science advances in leaps and bounds, religious beliefs created centuries before have become less and less relevant.  Although there will always be people who cling to the past, the general movement in the first world is towards enlightenment, and even those who are religious understand that belief should be a matter of personal feelings and not something imposed on others politically.
Some have theorized that this may be due to the entrance of women into the working world in the past few decades; in general, women are more religious than men and are also more likely to connect to a church group socially.  But today's working women don't have the time to make those connections like they did in the past.  It's a possibility. 
Another factor is the rise of the internet and social media in general; although the web has had some negative effects over the years, like giving voice to trolls and allowing groups like white supremacists to meet up, for the most part it has been a force for a progressive movement forward.  For years, gays, atheists and other misfits in small towns around the world felt that they were all alone; the internet has provided them all a sense of community and togetherness.  Also, the  enormous amount of access to information the net provides can bring facts to people who might not get them otherwise.  There was  a New York Times article in 2013  that discussed how converts to the Mormon faith were often shocked to discover online that the religion's founder Joseph Smith had around 40 wives; not surprisingly the church had hidden that negative bit of news for years, but that kind of sweeping under the rug can't last in our modern era.
I myself had a similar experience regarding the religious school that my parents sent me to when I was child, which was Lutheran.  At that school, we were told the history of Martin Luther's founding of the church and other often glowing descriptions of his life.  It wasn't until years later that I discovered online that Luther was a virulent anti Semite who had  had an influence on Nazi Germany centuries after his death; although I was no longer  affiliated with the church,  I was angered at the school's attempt to avoid the ugly truth about the church's founder.  My story and others like it show that the real history of religion cannot be hidden like it has been in the past, and the fact that 62% of voters in a heavily Catholic country like Ireland can ignore the church on gay marriage shows the waning influence of religion.  Progress is often slow, but the world is mostly moving in the right direction.

SPORTS LOVE

Why do people love sports so much?  Even asking the question seems odd to many people. Sporting events are  popular all around the world, cutting through all demographics and cultures, with professional athletes making huge amounts of money and breathing the same rarified celebrity air that movie stars and pop stars do.  For most sports fans, their fandom is more a state of being than a choice; you might as well ask someone why they're right handed.
But ask I will.  Step back and take a look at professional sports objectively: here you have people cheering and feeling a deep emotional connection with a group of athletes who have been designated to represent a certain location.  Most of those screaming fans will never meet any of the players, many of whom do not even come from the place that they play for.  And every year, teams bring in new players for fans to cheer for, and the fans don't care who those players are as long as they're on your team and play well.  Fans even have the strange experience of cheering for one player one year, and then booing for that same player the next when he's traded to a rival team.
People like myself who aren't sports fans can be a bit overwhelmed by the level of interest and devotion people show, from fans sitting in freezing cold weather just to watch a game they could be watching on TV, to kids spending money on athletic playing cards, to even fights and riots between rival fans, that devotion at times seems downright crazy.  And while us non fans can rant about what a waste of time watching sports is, we're fighting a losing battle, with athletic events like the Superbowl and The World's Cup drawing enormous media attention every time  they arrive.

Boy, I hope their team won

But I ask again, why?  It would appear that an interest in sports is primal; some of the earliest and most primitive of human societies engaged in physical contests.  They probably served an important purpose at that time; our ancient ancestors were mainly hunters , and playing games that developed skills like spear throwing was a way for the hunters to keep themselves sharp and train younger members of the tribe.  Since those hunters were almost exclusively men, it also gave them a chance to display to the women the various physical attributes (speed, strength) that would make them a good provider and mate, which would someday lead to  the stereotype of the star quarterback that all the girls want to date.  Sports coming from mostly hunting training would also explain why there are so few truly famous female athletes (Oh sure, there are many women playing sports like basketball and soccer, but the possibility of a female athlete reaching the level of fame that, say,  Michael Jordan  or Tiger Woods have, is far from likely.)
Sports played another role in primitive societies in that they allowed rival tribes to compete in a non violent fashion when war was deemed too difficult.  That would explain the  regional ties that sports fans have with their teams, that strong sense of identification probably has its descendent from times when athletic contests really were important and success for a group of athletes meant success for the entire tribe.  So, while sports is not my thing, I don't think there's anything wrong with enjoying them, unless, of course, things go too far.

Pictured above, Minnesota hockey fans take things too far

However,  controversy  has recently hit the sports world in America.  Football, our most popular sport, is under attack.  Recently, something that should have always been obvious, has been proven; having 350lb men crush you into the ground repeatedly can cause both physical and mental damage, no matter how much padding you're wearing.  While injury have always been a part of the sport, it is know known that the National Football League has been lying to players for years over the extent of those injuries, with some people going so far as to compare the NFL with tobacco companies that lied about the effects of tobacco for years.  A settlement of around nine hundred million dollars was finally paid out to some eighteen thousand players.
But even with that settlement behind it, the NFL is still in trouble.  While it continues to rake in billions of dollars every year, its future is in doubt, and the game's attempt at damage control continues. Thankfully, the days of defensive players trying to help their team by making particularly vicious tackles on star players to try and take them out of the game are no more in football. Recently, the NFL  tried to pass new rules on defensive tackling that avoid the head shots that can cause deeply damaging concussions.  While this is understandable,  it seems contradictory in a sport where fans cheer for brutal tackles and pile ons.  
How does the future of the NFL hold? Since we know now the deep risks involved in the sport, how many parents will let their children play?  The New York Times reports that a recent Bloomberg poll found that half of all Americans do not want their children playing football.  Are a few moments of possible glory and excitement worth the risks of terrible injuries? Another part of the NFL's damage control is holding group meetings aimed at mother's trying to convince them that the game is now safe.  Also, in what may qualify as the world's most obvious move, more and more children's football leagues are moving away from tackle games to touch or flag football. (It seems amazing to me that people actually think it's a good idea for children, some well under the age of 12, to play a full contact sport).  But, at the end of the day, the NFL admits that a stunning 30% of players will suffer from serious mental issues in their life times, and there's really no way around that. It's no surprise that  best selling author (and former football fan) Malcom Gladwell recently called football a "moral abomination", and even legendary tough guy coach Mike Ditka, on a recent episode of HBO's Real Sports, admitted he wouldn't let his own sons play football, simply saying "I think the risk isn't worth the reward."
Personally, I hope football's days are numbered, and that it dwindles in popularity until it essentially dies out, like the once popular sport of boxing has slowly been doing.  There's enough excitement in baseball, basketball and other sports for people to leave the more vicious sports behind.

REWARDING BAD BEHAVIOR

As a progressive, you can probably imagine that I'm not too happy with the recent mid term elections in which the Republican party gained more seats in the house and captured the senate.  Yes, there was a lot to be sad about, from governor Sam Brownback's victory in Kansas after he bankrupted the state (what's a Republican got to do to lose there, rob a bank?) to Joni Ernst winning a senate seat in Iowa while supporting a personhood amendment and saying that federal officials implementing Obamacare should be arrested.
At times like this, I often find myself angry at the American public; how could we put in power a party that opposes raising the minimum wage and won't accept the proven science of climate change? But then I look at the election numbers: only about thirty percent of eligible voters turned out, with the electorate this time being much older whiter and male than in 2012.  It seems that younger Americans are too busy living their lives to vote in an election that doesn't decide the presidency.  And most people don't follow politics closely, with many Americans not knowing which party controls which branch of government at any given time.  And the people who do have the time to follow politics are often retired, and therefore older and more likely to vote Republican.

It's also interesting to note how cyclical this process is: in the past ten years we have gone from the Republicans claiming a "pertinent majority" with George W Bush's reelection in 2004 to the Democrats roaring back and being seen as the wave of the future in 2006 and 2008, to once again have the Republicans surge in the 2010 midterm, only to lose ground (and the presidency) in 2012.  Sadly, our divided do nothing political system seems like the one we deserve.  Until the Democrats can get voters to come out to vote in mid term elections or Republicans can find a way to expand their base beyond older white men, one party dominance seems impossible.

This man read GREEN EGGS AND HAM out loud during the government shut down,
and he may be our next president

But I found this election particularly galling because it has validated the utterly cynical nature of the Republican strategy of gridlock and lockstep opposition.  Ever since President Barak Obama took office, the Republican party has attacked nearly everything he has done and shown a distinct lack of respect for him as president.  From senator Joe Wilson literally yelling "You lie!" at the president during the 2009 state of the union speech to house member Louis Gohmert's claim that the Obama administration was infiltrated by the Muslim Brotherhood, the Republicans in congress have thrown every piece of mud they could at the president. (And don't get me started on the right wing media and the so called "birther movement"). In the senate  Republicans have reflexively used the filibuster, to slow or kill his agenda.  And, since the Republicans retook the house in 2010, they have passed less legislation than any congress ever.  They have, on the other hand, tried to repeal Obamacare over forty times, and wasted time and money investigating the so called "Bengazi scandal".  And, of course, they literally shut down the government in 2013.  Why have the voters forgotten that?

The worst part of this strategy is that they have managed to blame the gridlock on the president, implying that it was his lack of outreach to them that is to blame.  (Honestly, how are you supposed to reach out to people who call you a Marxist Muslim that hates America?).  Somewhat amazingly, Republicans have complained that Obama has not made the same kind of outreach to them that Bill Clinton did when he was president back in the 90's.  Now while it's true that Clinton signed into law Republican backed bills like Welfare Reform and The Defense of Marriage act, the Republicans seem to have forgotten the part where they rewarded his compromises by trying to impeach him over the nonsensical Monica Lewinsky scandal.
I've already mentioned that most Americans don't follow politics closely, but when they do see things going wrong, they tend the party of the president in power, and so they blame the political dead lock on Obama and his approval ratings have suffered.  Although Obama has not been a perfect president, it irks me how his low ratings are not deserved: the day after the Republican victory, a jobs report came out saying that unemployment has dipped to five point eight  percent, the lowest it's been in six years.  To put that in a proper perspective, the Obama administration has created 5.9 million jobs since 2009,  that's four times as many jobs as the Bush administration created in eight years. And yet he gets no credit for this.  Not to mention the fact that if the Republicans had not opposed his 2014  highway work bill, unemployment would be even lower and our critically sagging infrastructure would be improved. Now to be fair, wages for most Americans have been stagnant, even as job growth has continued, but neither party seems able to deal with that issue in the short term, and certainly the Republican plan of cutting taxes for the rich yet again will do little or nothing to improve the wages of average Americans. And then there's Obamacare, which, after its initially disastrous beginning, is clearly working,  bringing millions of uncovered Americans into the health care system; in fact, despite their open hatred of it, few Republicans mentioned it as an issue during the campaign.
So with the economy rebounding and Obamacare working, why is the president's approval rating sliding?  Part of the problem is our 24/7 news media, that covered the rise of the radical terrorist group ISIS as something Obama was slow to deal with (like every president we've had for the past 50 years, middle east unrest has become a thorn in his side), and that made the relatively minor ebola crisis look like a huge problem that the president didn't deal with(as if he could micromanage every decision made at every hospital in the country).  Also there's the issue of president fatigue; because everything the president does is considered news, Americans seem to tire of seeing our commander in chief giving yet another speech or visiting  yet another diner or grocery store on the news after six years, and we start to look forward to the next election.

And the next election should prove to be interesting, with many pundits saying that the real winner in the mid terms is Hillary Clinton, who will have a conservative senate to battle against in 2016 when she runs for president (and let's face it, she will).  But even if she does win, she will almost definitely be up against a Republican congress that will stand as strongly against everything she does as they did against Obama, and we'll be grid locked once again.  Is there any way that America will move beyond this? Perhaps someday, and here's why: in a recent interview in England, Oprah Winfrey sparked controversy when she said this about racism: "There are still generations of people, older people, who were born and bred and marinated in it, in that prejudice and racism, and they just have to die,".  Blunt her words may have been, but she wasn't far off from the truth in my opinion, and that certainly pertains to the future of the Republican party.  The Republican base of older white men is slowly dying off, and if they don't find a way to appeal more to women, minorities, young people and gay people they may never hold the white house again.  (And don't just take my word for it, Republican studies done after the 2012 election came to the same conclusion).  So let's hope that someday the words moderation and compromise enter the Republican vocabulary.

KILL THE DEATH PENALTY

In a recent ruling, Judge Cormac Carney of California ruled that the death penalty system in that state was:  "a system in which arbitrary factors, rather than legitimate ones like the nature of the crime or the date of the death sentence, determine whether an individual will actually be executed. And it has resulted in a system that serves no penological purpose. Such a system is unconstitutional."   While only describing the capital punishment system in one state, his words could easily be used to describe our terrible, barbaric system that 32 states in our country cling to, despite the fact that no other first world country still uses state approved murder as a method of punishment.  America is alone in the first world, putting us next to countries with brutal governments like Iran and North Korea.
Like abortion, the death penalty is an emotional and divisive issue because it deals with life and death, and like that issue, reasonable people can be found on both sides.  While I obviously am deeply opposed to using murder as justice, I can understand the pro death penalty argument: it's reserved for only the worst criminals who have killed one or more people in brutal fashion, and it allows for closure for the friends and family of the victims.  It also serves as a deterrent to other possible murderers.   But, starting with that last point, why then does the US have more homicides than other industrialized nations that don't have a death penalty?  And even in America, states with capital punishment do not have lower homicide rates; North Dakota, without a death penalty, consistently has one of the lowest homicide rates,  while death penalty using Louisiana has one of the highest. The deterrent argument just doesn't add up.

I personally feel that the use of the death penalty can add to a culture of violence, not prevent it.  In the constant debate our society has on the effect of  violent  media on children, we rarely ask the question, "what does the use of capital punishment tell them?"  That some people deserve to die?  That it's alright to kill some people?  Is that really the message we want them to receive?  That barbaric vengeance is sometimes necessary?

Add to that the arbitrary unfairness of it; obviously the state you commit a crime in can effect whether or not you face the death penalty, but even worse is the wealth of the defendant can play a big role in that possibility.  Like so many things in our country, our legal system is heavily slanted towards the rich, with those who are able to pay for a good legal team running a much higher chance of avoiding capital punishment than a poor person with a court appointed lawyer.  How corrupt is our system?  Consider that the American Bar Association pointed out the flaws of the system in 1997, and then called for a moratorium on capital punishment in 2001, and these are people who work with the system constantly.

Guillotines, in a museum where they belong

And poor legal representation leads to the single main reason I am against capital punishment: mistakes are made.  There is no one in the world who can look me in the eye and guarantee that they are sure that every person on death row is absolutely guilty.   And that every person who has been put to death was guilty.  And that every person that ever will be put be death will be guilty.  It's impossible.  There is no doubt in my mind that innocent people have been and will continue to be killed by our government in the name of justice.  And when an innocent person is killed by the state, then every taxpayer in that state becomes an accomplice to murder because their tax dollars pay for the machinery of death.
Capital punishment was struck down by the US supreme court from 1972 to 1976; since then, according to the Death Penalty Information Center,  143 innocent prisoners have been exonerated from death row.  Many of them came very close to being executed.  How many innocent people have been killed?  We have no way of knowing, but it's obvious that once an execution is carried out, there's little incentive to further investigate the case, so it's safe to say that mistakes are made.
And that's the bottom line: I think it's a fair trade off to have the absolute worst criminals spend the rest of their lives behind bars rather than run the risk of innocent people being killed.  An innocent person wrongly jailed can eventually have his or her name cleared, but you can't overturn a killing.

PRISON NATION PT 2

In part one of this subject I took a look at America current status as the world's number one jailor.  Now let's take a look at what helps fuel that status: the war on drugs.  Putting it bluntly, the war on drugs has been a disaster in this country.  It stands for everything the US does wrong: it's racist, classist, wasteful, ineffective, hypocritical and puritanical.  And what better argument can be made for its failure than the fact that,  despite our huge prison population, our country remains the number one market for illegal drugs in the world.  (According to a recent Frontline report, the government estimates that the US spends around 60 billion dollars a year on illegal drugs).  To be blunt once again, the only possible way that the war on drugs can be seen as a success is if its goal was to jail as many poor minorities as possible.

The term war on drugs was created by the media in 1971 after president Richard Nixon called drugs "public enemy number one", but it really took off in the early 1980's with the arrival of crack cocaine.  For those of us who can remember that time, the spread of crack was indeed frightening, with nearly every inner city neighborhood in America having a serious problem with crack related gang violence virtually overnight.   While the negative effects of the drug were often overestimated (a recent article in the New York  Times showed that the media's fears of a generation of crack babies leading horrible lives were overblown at the time), it was a undeniably scary drug.  But, sadly, our reaction to it was to greatly increase drug sentencing laws, which were inevitably used disproportionately against minorities;  in 1986 President Reagan signed the Anti Drug Abuse act into law.  It contained a whopping twenty nine new mandatory minimum sentences, and even worse, punished crack cocaine violators more than powder cocaine ones at a ratio of one hundred to one.  Although this law was repealed in 2010  by President Obama, the damage had been done, and for years crack users, overwhelmingly minorities, were given long prison sentences, while mostly white powder cocaine users were given a slap on the wrist.

Sadly, the blatantly racist aspects of the war on drugs continue to this day: current polling shows that although white people are more likely than Black people to smoke marijuana, Blacks are five times more likely to be arrested for that crime.  From the stop and frisk laws in New York City to the automatic pulling over of any nonwhite male driving a nice car all over the country, the war on drugs is mostly about jailing non white men.  While in jail they are forced to survive in an environment filled with murderers and other brutal criminals, which often results in their coming out far more violent than when they entered.  And jail time is just the beginning: after their release a prison record hangs over their head for the rest of their lives, making them second class citizens with limited job options.  In 2012 author Michelle Alexander published a book about the drug war entitled THE NEW JIM CROW : MASS INCARCERATION  IN THE AGE OF  COLORBLINDNESS, and really, the name says it all.

Let's face it, for a lot of people in this country, youthful experimentation with drugs is seen as right of passage; while most parents certainly don't encourage it, many of them  expect that their  kids will try drugs at some point in their lives, like in college, and that most of them will not suffer any long term ill effects from their experimentation.   Just look at our last three presidents, Obama, Bush and Clinton, who have all admitted to using drugs in their younger years, without it having a serious effect on their electability. As Bush put it, "when I was young and foolish, I was young and foolish", essentially shrugging off an illegal activity by implying that everybody does it.  So why are Americans willing to accept former drug use in our leaders, but still think that non violent drug users should go to jail?  And why aren't we angrier about the hypocritical way that those leaders punish others for doing something they themselves did?
Also, there is the simple question of freedom: if someone is an adult in a free society, and they willingly choose to take drugs, and that drug use does not involve harming or threatening anyone else or anyone else's property, why is that person a criminal?  Why can their freedom be taken away?  Are drugs potentially harmful and even deadly?  Obviously.  But consider that it is perfectly legal for an adult to buy an entire bottle of vodka or Jack Daniels with the intention of drinking it all in one day, which would be just as  harmful or deadly as taking any other drug.  Alcohol kills tens of  thousands of Americans every year, sometimes slowly(like through cirrhosis of the liver) or quickly, through alcohol poisoning(the center for disease control states that binge drinking alone kills around eighty eight thousand people a year in this country) , and when a person is addicted to alcohol, trying to stop can be agonizing and cause drunken tremors and hallucinations.  Given all of that, why are other drugs illegal and alcohol isn't?

"Alright men, we dumped out four barrels.  I guess we got this alcohol problem licked!"

Speaking of alcohol, we all know that this country had a prohibition of alcohol from 1920 to 1933, and you would be hard pressed to find any historian who would call it anything other than disastrous.  Making liquor illegal only increased its usage while opening the door to an extremely profitable illicit bootleg market in which rival criminals often violently protected their turf from others.  Sound familiar?  Why can't America learn from its past mistakes and realize that the real problem with drugs isn't the drugs themselves, but the enormous amounts of money to be made off transporting and selling them?  And that as long as that money is there to be made, there will always be people trying to make it, especially in a money worshiping culture like ours?
So how should we legalize drugs?  It's a difficult question: I am certainly opposed to the idea of privatizing drugs, so that corporations could actually profit from getting people addicted.  One need look no further than the horrible behavior of alcohol and tobacco companies, who downplay the dangers of their products and  sometimes blatantly aim their advertising at children, to see how terrible an idea that is.  (I'm old enough to remember candy cigarettes that were sold to kids in packages with real tobacco company labels.  What could be more evil?!)   What I propose is that we have government run stores that adults could enter and buy drugs in, with signs that clearly explain the negative effects of each drug, and safe rooms for them to take the drugs. They could also take the drugs home and use them there, or at specially designated bars or cafes, but not in public. And the crucial element of the stores would be that the drugs would be sold at a very low cost, putting all the drug dealers out of business.  Meanwhile, the federal  Drug Enforcement Agency could be modified to only go after drug dealers who try to sell to children, for whom I certainly have no sympathy for, and the money saved from incarcerating less people can be used to make federal drug rehab centers bigger and better.  I will freely admit that most of this idea comes from the late conservative icon William F Buckley, which shows that ending the war on drugs can be a conservative position.  After all, the drug war is a wasteful big government  program that interferes with people's lives, everything that conservatives claim to hate.

Like the gay marriage issue, there has been a sea change in public opinion concerning the  legalization of marijuana, with Washington State and Colorado passing outright legalization while twenty other states allow it for medical use.  Along with that, more and more Americans are coming to the common sense conclusion that it's better (and cheaper) to put non violent drug users into rehab than jail.  Hopefully, these trends will continue and America's dreadful war on drugs will become a thing of the past.

PRISON NATION PT 1

In 2014, for the first time in years, the American prison population began to decline.  That's the good news; the bad news is that America still incarcerates more people than any other country in the world.  It's hard to get one's head around just how draconian the US prison system is: America makes up just five percent of the world's population, but has twenty five percent of the world's prisoners.  With a total prison population of around two to three million people (plus millions more on probation), we jail more people than China and Russia. Given these awful numbers, how can we honestly call ourselves the land of the free?
How did America come to such a shameful state of affairs?  The first part began in the early 1970's when then president Richard Nixon began a "war on crime", combined with a "war on drugs", both of which were really responses to the tumult the country went through in the 60's, from violent anti war protests to hippies smoking pot,  to many middle Americans the country was out of control, and that a crack down on scofflaws was needed.  Things stepped up in the 1980's when crack cocaine began to be sold in inner cities and president Ronald Reagan responded by signing the Anti Drug Abuse Act in 1986, which had minimum mandatory sentences for non violent drug possession.
Another turning point came in the 1988 presidential election: at first, Vice President George Bush was running behind Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, but then Bush's campaign manager Lee Atwater discovered that while he was governor, Dukakis had furloughed a man named Willie Horton, who went on to rape and murder a woman.  Pouncing on this story, Atwater whipped up a fear campaign that prominently featured the black Horton's mug shot in TV ads and mailers.

"By the time we're finished,  they're going to wonder whether
Willie Horton is Dukakis' running mate."-Lee Atwater

The campaign not only worked for Bush, it lead the way for conservatives in the 1990's.  For years Republicans had benefited from scaring the American public about the Communist menace, saying that they were the ones strong enough to stand up to the reds.  But with the collapse of Soviet Russia and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the party was without an enemy.  The Horton campaign gave them a new one: crime, particularly crimes committed by non white people.  Forgetting that violent crime was at its highest rate in 1984 when Reagan, a Republican, was president, they latched onto this new issue.  Sadly, the Democrats, not wanting to appear soft on crime, went along with this trend; in one of the more shameful moments of presidential campaign history, then Arkansas governor Bill Clinton halted to his race for the presidency to return to Arkansas to sign the death warrant of a death row criminal.

Then in 1993, the horrific kidnapping and killing of a twelve year old girl in California by Richard Davis made national headlines, leading the voters of that state to  pass  the "Three Strikes Your Out" amendment , which mandated a life sentence for a criminal convicted of a third felony.  Lost in the anger and fear over the Davis case was the fact that the law would apply to non violent felons, like  drug addicts.  (In an interesting bit of irony, the father of the murder victim actually came out against the amendment's passage, to no avail).  The passage of that amendment lead to many similar laws being passed in other states, leading to an inevitable increase in the prison population.

Another reason for the increase in prisoners in the US is the terrible trend of states turning to private prisons that are run for profit to incarcerate prisoners.  Beginning in the 1980's, companies like the Correction Corporation of America have profited from more people being imprisoned, and, like all corporations in America, they have lobbied congress to protect their interests, throwing their weight and money behind politicians who promise to get tough on crime, thereby increasing the number of "customers" in their jails. It's a vicious cycle, one that has been given the frightening moniker of  "the prison industrial complex".

As I said at the top of the post there is a trend to slowly but surely reduce prison populations in this country.  I would love to say that this is just because of common sense and compassion for non violent drug offenders, but actually, the reason is simple economics.  After the disastrous economic crash of 2008, many states were strapped for cash, which resulted in them taking a long hard look at their budgets and realizing that doing things like putting non violent drug addicts into rehab instead of jail would save money.   And so, this country's disastrous turn towards becoming the world's number one jailor appears to be turning, unfortunately it took the worst recession since the great depression to make that turn.