Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
Legal or openly tolerated racism is not the only reason that members of minorities don't settle in particular places. One of the strongest reasons is that years of segregation create distinct communities which people have ties to and don't always want to leave. That's why minorities are bigger (if that sentence makes any sense) in larger population centers. There are enough to reach critical mass so they maintain an echo of the community they used to belong to. No matter what the law says and how sincerely the majority welcomes people, it's not easy to make the transition. It's even more obvious with immigrant communities who bring languages and cuisines from another country. How many of us are adventurous enough to settle in a place where we'll never hear our native language or eat the food our mother cooked again? (Well with my mother's cooking that would be real easy.)
No, you've got it exactly backwards. The main reason drugs hurt people is that they're illegal. Most "drug-related deaths" are: People caught in the crossfire of the War on Drugs or in battles between mobsters who only exist because there's a black market to support them; People who get the wrong dose because their drugs don't come with labels telling them how much is in them; People who get drugs they're not expecting because dealers cut them with cheaper but more dangerous stuff like amphetamine or methamphetamine; People who find it difficult to get the drug they want because it's too hard to conceal, like smelly, bulky, urine-tainting marijuana, so somebody sells them something that they hope will give approximately the same high but is more dangerous like meth; People who have the similar experience of finding their drug of choice more concentrated because it's less risky to transport, e.g., crack instead of powder cocaine; People who learn that the entire world has been lying to them about marijuana so they figure they're probably lying about all the other drugs too and they try one.
Deliberate and accidental misuse of legal prescription and OTC drugs kill about ten times as many Americans as all illegal drugs combined. No one has ever been killed directly by marijuana. I'd rather share the freeway with a million paranoid, right-lane hugging, slow-moving pot-heads, than the usual assortment of finger-stabbing, tailgating, horn-blowing caffeine junkies that are out there every single goddamn morning.
When L.A. police chief Darryl Gates said about fifteen years ago that he wished he had the legal authority to shoot marijuana smokers, a letter from one of his desired victims was widely published. The point was, "Of course you do. That's the only way you old farts can make the drugs WE use as deadly as the alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine that YOU use!"
The poison is lies. I'm sad to learn that you've been infected. My mother watched Prohibition destroy America. Women started going to bars. Children were recruited as moonshine runners because the cops would go easy on them. Gangsters were more prosperous than honest businessmen and became more attractive role models. People were being killed by contaminated hooch produced by amateurs. And more people drank during Prohibition than before it. She was a knee-jerk Republican who hated FDR, but till her dying day about five years ago she said she forgave him for all of his "liberal mistakes" because he got Prohibition repealed. And she didn't even like booze. Even she, at a cranky 87, saw that the War on Drugs was just Prohibition II, and it made her cry.
Exactly. England was eyeing the Confederacy jealously, wanting their cotton. They would have re-annexed them in a second. And the slaves would have been freed instantly because it was already illegal in the British Empire. Lincoln caused Americans to come out of the Civil War believing that it was fought over slavery. The half million dead created an unconscious rift between the black citizens who were presented as the winners and the white citizens who had to bury their dead and began to wonder if it was all worth it. A rift that to this day has not healed. Especially when Brazil, the last holdout and the land of the cruelest slaveholders in the world, abolished it peacefully within thirty years and now they don't even have white people and black people.
Alternate histories make great stories. Personally I think the entire 20th Century would have been different if Woodrow Wilson had had the strength of character to allow the people to speak out against the US entering WWI. They probably would have prevailed, since A) they were still strongly isolationist and B) there was a still lot of enmity between the US and Britain, half the citizenry would have wanted us to enter on the German side. Instead he jailed the protesters, pulled off the Lusitania scam, and tried to go down in history as the man who united the world, instead of one of the most deceitful megalomanic assholes in the history of our country. If Germany had won WWI, there would have been no humiliation at Versailles, no Third Reich, no paranoid Stalin feeling the need to waste half his nation's GDP on a war machine, no French Indochina ready to fall under the spell of Ho Chi Minh, and China would have remained under the domination of the Japanese, which could hardly have been any worse for them than Mao, and a whole lot better for the rest of us.
But at the very least, if we had let the eleven southern states have their way, we would not today be continually having the Union flag waved in our faces by people who still fly the Confederate battle flag over their own statehouses but pretend to be more patriotic than we are.
Who can figure out the Texans. Suffice it to say that they have managed to maintain an isolated power grid. The rest of us could have a blackout that would knock out the entire continent north of the Rio Grande... except Texas would still have air conditioning.
Most people find it becomes more difficult to commit violence as they age. You'll probably be a vegetarian in ten years if you're not already. And when President Jenna Bush tries to invade France, you'll be carrying a picket sign with the rest of us.
