The Hypocrisy of Joe Six-Pack vs. Joe Dime Bag

Few things, if any, will erode your moral authority more than hypocrisy. You simply can't be taken seriously if you fiercely condemn some people for using intoxicating drugs while simultaneously glorifying others who use, sell or promote them. Yet, through the false dichotomy of "alcohol and drugs" that's precisely what we're doing. Saying alcohol and drugs is like saying cocaine and drugs or linebackers and football players. It just doesn't make sense. How is the guy who smokes pot such a social pariah that we need to lock him up, while Joe Six-pack, whose drug is alcohol, is celebrated as a virtuous, salt of the earth American. Bear in mind that you can't claim marijuana is bad because it's illegal. Since we make something illegal on the premise that it's bad, an argument that something is bad because it's illegal and illegal because it's bad would be circular and fallacious. This begs the question, why is pot illegal and alcohol legal?

Let's examine which is the greater scourge by comparing the dangers and problems associated with the preferred drugs of Joe Six-Pack and Joe Dime Bag. After indulging, which of these two is more likely to knock his wife from one end of the trailer (or mansion) to the other? Which is much, much more likely to fall prey to a crippling addiction and all that goes with it? If you said Sarah Palin's beloved Joe Six-Pack to both of these, give yourself 10 points. Numerous destructive social ills are inextricably tied to alcohol consumption, while Joe Dime Bag is unlikely to do anything more harmful than eating a teeming bowl of Cocoa Puffs followed by a lengthy contemplation on how the brown milk in the bottom of the bowl represents the combined essence of the milk and the puffs. Well that certainly doesn't tell me why we banned marijuana rather than alcohol! Okay, the analysis of the pot smoker was done somewhat tongue in cheek, and all mood altering drugs, marijuana included, carry certain perils that extend well beyond eating cereal. Nevertheless, in all seriousness, violent anti-social behavior is undeniably more closely tied to alcohol than marijuana, and alcohol is also far more addictive.

Every society has a drug of choice, and in the United States, that drug is alcohol. We tried to prohibit it by Constitutional Amendment, but we learned that even with all the social pathologies that attend legalized drinking, that prescription was worse than the disease. I'm embarrassed that we can't see the parallel and apply the lesson of our ill-fated prohibition to the disastrous war on drugs. We don't have to legalize more dangerous drugs, but marijuana should immediately be treated like alcohol. It's clearly less harmful than booze, not more harmful. Sell it in what amount to liquor stores, replacing criminal profits with legitimate jobs and tax revenue, while saving billions of dollars in criminal justice expenditures. Whatever negative consequences might accompany legalization, like the repeal of prohibition, the pluses should vastly outweigh the minuses.

The Land of the Free?

This is an extension of my last post, which dealt with zero-tolerance policies. I want to look at other mandates that strip decision making powers from designated decision makers. I'm most concerned about mandatory minimum sentences, particularly with respect to drug offenders. We should have stood up and taken notice when Gen. Barry McCaffrey, the country's drug czar at the time, called our ever increasing prison population, "America's internal gulag." The United States has roughly 2.4 million people in prison or jail. China is next with about 1.5 million people incarcerated, but they have more than four times our population. We are by far the most imprisoned society on the face of the earth both in terms of raw numbers and percentage of citizens locked up. When you consider this, along with the fact that our prison population explosion, which began with the Nixon era crackdown on drugs but really took off with the Reagan era hysteria over drugs, which resembled a small child's fear of the bogeyman, we should all feel uneasy when we call ourselves the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Why would we mandate what judges must do, before all the facts are revealed and circumstances considered? We're not removing these jurists for acting improperly, but we're saying that they can't be trusted to do a proper job. That sounds like giving an electrician a contract to rewire a building while declaring that he or she can't be trusted to work on electrical systems. Are empathy and compassion really such pernicious demons that they must be exorcised by preemptive strike, and a judge cannot be allowed to use judgment? This is what happens when a society takes its orders from reactionaries who dismissively say, "Off with their heads!" as long they don't have to actually see, let alone be, the one who swings the axe, not to mention those being so harshly punished or their devastated loved ones. We're tough as nails as long everything is sanitized and we can easily ignore the impact of what we've wrought.

Harsh mandatory sentencing is fraught with problems and unintended consequences. Due to sharply increased prison expenditures, many cash strapped states have been forced to make offsetting reductions to education spending. We can also safely say that the massive cost of warehousing non-violent drug offenders has not yielded a satisfactory return. We have not seen the reduction in crime we expected from imprisoning so many for so long. One perverse unintended consequence is that low-level drug offenders are now often sentenced far more harshly than those who truly plague our society because, unlike more dangerous criminals, they typically have nothing to offer prosecutors who now have the discretion instead of judges. Also, since flooding our prisons is a relatively new phenomenon, we don't yet know the impact of eventually releasing such a multitude of people hardened by prison and forever stigmatized as criminals.

I'm sympathetic to those who have the extremely difficult and thankless job of constructing and implementing our system of justice, but we should have seen this coming. Since budget crises across the country are causing states to release prisoners earlier than they had planned, the time to correct the injustice may be here. While the issue of prison expense is center stage, we are presented with a golden opportunity to revisit some wrongheaded policies. Reform proposals will be met with reflexive cries of "soft on crime", but they can be neutralized with fiscal reality. Would-be reformers can explain to people who are terrified that someone might smoke a joint instead of drinking a beer that we'll be happy to lock that person up, but we'll need you to pony up more taxes to do so.

Zero Wisdom + Zero Courage = Zero-Tolerance

In the United States we treasure individualism, so much so that many in our society see anything that even remotely smacks of collectivism as something dark and evil. We honor liberty and courage as supreme blessings and virtues, quite literally singing their praises as the climactic finish of our national anthem. Yet, for reasons passing understanding, we seem to have fallen in love with mandates that tie our hands and leave us at the mercy of predetermination even in cases where it seems preposterous. These mandates stand in diametric opposition to both freedom and courage, as they leave no opportunity for discretion no matter how obviously it's called for, and they insulate those who are paid to be decision makers from actually having to take a stand, make the call and accept the consequences. We find this occurring throughout our society anywhere we see the words zero-tolerance.

The worst culprit by far is our education system. Our school systems lead the league by a wide margin when it comes to mindless implementation of zero-tolerance polices resulting in outcomes that would make any reasonable person cringe. In one recent story, common sense was somehow allowed to eventually sneak through the schoolhouse door and six year old Zachary Christie, originally sentenced to spend 45 days in "alternative school" for troublemakers, subsequently received a reduced punishment for eating lunch with his favorite camping tool, which had a fork, spoon and knife. Perhaps even more troubling, this same school district had already been forced to confront the folly of mandatory draconian punishment for what an innocent child (or a person with a scintilla of common sense) would never see as introducing danger. Last year a 5th grade girl was to be expelled because she brought in a birthday cake along with a serrated knife to cut it. She later got a reprieve and the state then passed a law allowing school districts to (gasp) exercise some judgment on punishments, but the law only covered cases involving expulsion. The school district obviously learned nothing from the prior year's disgrace, and the equally cowardly legislature essentially said that common sense should be viewed in the same light as a tourniquet or poison pill -- something to be used only in the direst of emergencies!

Speaking of relatively harmless serrated knives and idiotic school punishments, a few years ago Lindsay Brown, a Florida high school senior and National Merit Scholar was, among other things, forbidden to attend her own graduation after a kitchen knife (the kind parents place at the right of a child's dinner plate - not a weapon) was found on the passenger side floorboard of her car. Leaving aside the fact that this object is less dangerous as a weapon than a pencil, her explanation that she had no idea it was there was entirely plausible. She had been in the process of moving and the knife very likely fell out of one of her boxes. Nevertheless, school administrators were strictly forbidden to exhibit any evidence whatsoever of brain function. She was also arrested and spent nine hours in jail. The charges were later dropped.

The last example I will cite is that of Jonathan Prevette, a six year old boy who kissed a girl on the cheek after she asked him to. He was suspended and forced to miss an ice cream social at school because he was, under the school's witless policy, guilty of sexual harassment. I wish I could tell you that there weren't many, many more instances of zero-tolerance foolishness, but I can't. If school policymakers are unable or unwilling to make the difficult discretionary calls, balancing the competing interests of school safety and equitable treatment of students, then I wouldn't let them near a school unless it was to perform a task involving a mop, a broom or a bucket of sawdust to throw over puke.

What's So Funny 'Bout Peace, Love and Understanding

In the unlikely event that reading my blog is the first thing you're doing after emerging from a lengthy coma, let me say welcome back and tell you that Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize last Friday. This award, surprising even to its recipient, was met with very mixed reactions, which is perfectly understandable and completely appropriate under the circumstance. It was also met with grossly inappropriate though utterly predictable rage and scorn from the legion of people who have been afflicted with a particularly virulent strain of white hot hatred for President Obama and all that he represents. The fair and arguably correct criticism of the award is that President Obama has not yet done anything worthy of the prize. With respect to the haters, had President Obama discovered a way for cars to run on household garbage and emit no pollution, simultaneously solving our landfill problem and our dependence on foreign oil, they would only scream about how he just ruined America by costing us jobs in both the sanitation and petroleum industries.

While those who believe that the Peace Prize should have been given to someone more deserving have a persuasive argument, I can also see some merit in the committee's decision and give it the benefit of the doubt. America's shift from a country with a foreign policy endorsed by the, "Nuke 'em 'til they glow then shoot 'em in the dark" set to a country that wants a leader who favors diplomacy, respect and understanding is an enormous boon to world peace. The United States' only peer in terms of military spending and might is the rest of the word combined. This brings us to "American exceptionalism." President Obama's foes, primarily the haters but also some reasonable thinkers who simply disagree with him, rail against his failure to preach American exceptionalism, and they bristle when he dares to suggest that we lack godlike infallibility. They want the president to be the equivalent of the unfit parent who swears that his or her child is never wrong and every conflict must therefore be someone else's fault. Ironically, Obama's Nobel Prize can be defended from either side of the American exceptionalism discussion. Simply because a U.S president can do more to alter the course of world peace than any other leader (American exceptionalism), President Obama's inauguration was a monumental event, particularly given his appetite for diplomacy and nuclear disarmament. At the same time, exceptional or not, he refuses to make jingoistic arrogance the centerpiece of his foreign policy, which is also a giant leap towards global peace.

If a research biologist uncovered an extremely promising cure for cancer, leaving the medical community giddy with excitement and landing the discovery on the cover of every news magazine, that scientist would be a slam dunk for the Nobel Prize in Medicine even before a single human patient had been cured. Yes, the discovery is itself an achievement and I'm not arguing that it's perfectly analogous to President Obama's Peace Prize, but it would still be an award based its promise of a yet unrealized benefit. Moreover, there is precedent for the Peace Prize to be awarded based on hope for the future as opposed to a completed accomplishment. Finally, the political right can't simultaneously argue that President Obama has ruined America by doing this, that and the other in his foreign policy and that he has not yet done anything. It seems to me that either he's done something or he's done nothing. If these critics are to avoid being dismissed out of hand, they must be consistent and not let their hatred contradict itself.

Lead, Follow or Get out of the Way

The post's title is probably my favorite Thomas Paine quote. It enjoyed new life and widely came into the public consciousness as a commercial tagline when Lee Iacocca was running Chrysler. It's certainly much more elegant than its modern counterpart, which because of its crudeness I won't repeat here, but suffice it to say that it rhymes with "knit or get off the cot." Paine's words should be a bare minimum standard for any elected official, and failure to adhere to them should automatically disqualify him or her for re-election. If this standard were applied, the sad and shameful truth is that a lot of familiar faces on Capitol Hill would disappear.

Let's get a couple of things straight. First, simply obstructing the problem solving efforts of others while offering little or nothing in the way of your own solutions is not to be celebrated as dissent or the sort of checks and balances the Constitution envisioned. The Monty Python crew understood this when they pointed out the following distinction, "Argument is an intellectual process. Contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying of any statement the other person makes." If you're only capable of offering the equivalent of contradiction and not a compelling argument, then we neither need nor want your input and we'll let those with something of value to add carry the day. Far too many in both chambers of Congress, especially the Senate, are failing to do the job for which they're accepting a paycheck. In many cases, if they practiced law the way they practice lawmaking they would be disbarred.

Secondly, the world is an imperfect place and, thus, simply finding fault with someone else's plan means nothing. With respect to health care reform, for instance, every proposal has its own set of problems and doing nothing at all would eventually be catastrophic. You add absolutely nothing to the dialogue if you only point out costs or other shortcomings without demonstrating that your idea, loss for loss, is better overall.

Finally, this should apply not only to lawmakers but also to the general marketplace of ideas. My patience with those who offer nothing but negativity has been exhausted. I could eventually bankrupt someone who took the following bet, turn on Rush Limbaugh at a random point during his show. If he's saying anything positive about right wing politics or anything else, I owe you $20; if he's simply spewing venom, you owe me $1. I recently posted a piece about our demons and better angels. Rush's world is composed almost exclusively of demons. He is to anger and hatred what Richard Simmons is to exercise for the corpulent elderly - no one works harder to promote it. I'm also out of patience with Obama haters. Predictably, the people beaming with schadenfreude when Obama failed to secure the Olympics for Chicago claimed last week that he didn't have the international star power people thought he had. Today those same people are fuming that he was awarded the Nobel peace prize solely because he has international star power! They don't care that they're vulnerable to the form shattering question, were you lying then or are you lying now? All that matters is that they get to hate, mock and scorn.

Fatal Abstraction

The parade of man's inhumanity to man continues. A recent victim was a 16 year old student from Chicago, beaten to death by a mob of other teens using lumber, fists and feet. Ironically, this chilling event provides fodder to both sides of the gun control debate. It supports the NRA claim that guns don't kill people; people kill people, but it also validates the gun control position that people tend to fight with whatever weapons are at their disposal and it's therefore exceedingly unwise to maximize the convenience and ease of killing rather than bruising one another. We'll call it a draw and I'll move on to what I really want to talk about. I want to look at why we seem to have so much animosity toward one another. Although the horrifying rate of cold-blooded murder on the meanest streets of our inner cities is lower in the tonier zip codes, it still feels like half of this country despises the other half, and the level of ill will we're harboring must be dialed down for this to be a healthy civilization.

That said, I can't help but wonder how much we actually dislike one another. Yes, the level of disdain that has permeated our discourse is inexcusable, but the silver lining in this mess may be that we hate much more in the abstract and much less in actual human interaction. We fire off much more vitriolic salvos at abstractions of things we don't like than we do at their concrete counterparts. Across the globe throughout history we've seen instances where large groups of people truly hated one another and every day was a bloodbath waiting to happen. Mercifully, this is not our current circumstance. Please don't get me wrong; our sorry state of affairs where civility has been bludgeoned to death has some serious consequences and we need to reverse this course, but there is a critical difference between extremely bad manners and extremely bad blood. I wouldn't want a broken index finger, but as problems go, it can hardly be compared to a broken spine.

The prescription lies in seeing the humanity in ourselves and others. Whether liberal or conservative, black or white, Muslim or Jew, gay or straight, we need to see the value and dignity in all human life. This is not holding hands and singing Kumbaya; this is self-evident common sense we would immediately see if we could get our collective head out of the orifice in which it never belonged in the first place. When we become an angry mob we lose touch with our own humanity and conscience. That's how otherwise civilized people commit savagery like the example cited at the top of this post. When we fail to see the humanity in others we are not only capable of unspeakable atrocities, but we also tend to be cruel in ways we sometimes don't even realize. We humiliate and demean others by, among other things, denying their full rights of citizenship and treating them as less than full-fledged human beings.

It's not hard to rise above this and take the high road; anyone can do it. Look at the example of Dick Cheney. Why would this poster boy for neo-conservatism support gay marriage? Because 40 year old Mary Cheney is not a nameless, faceless lesbian but his beloved daughter and mother of his grandson and mother-to-be of a second baby due next month. She is a woman committed to the love of her life and she has hopes and dreams like any other man's daughter. He wants her to have the same opportunity for happiness and fulfillment that any father would want for his children. For the former V.P. the issue will always have a human face. Sadly, until we can learn this simple lesson, senseless bloodshed will continue because the victims were not perceived as human beings, but as abstractions that fell prey to someone's inner demons.