So Far From Heaven

For some while I’ve been haranguing you bloggers to take a look at what this War on Drugs is doing to destroy our institutions, mainly in the criminal justice arena. Here’s an example of a tip-of-the-iceberg for-instance:

The Lincoln Courier, Lincoln, Ill, reports police Cpl. Diana R. Short, 46, and her husband, paramedic John T. Short, 41, were charged with several drug felonies, including growing marijuana in their home for distribution, plus charges of illegal weapons possession. Short’s husband has already accepted a plea bargain and was sentenced to six years. Meanwhile, Diana Short has pleaded not guilty; she faces 18-90 years in prison.

Okay. There’s going to be a bad apple in any barrel. Right? A cop sees a river of money running under her feet, same as all cops do. She’s holding a cup and she’s thirsty. Her pay, according to her thinking, isn’t at all what it should be, and she drives past crack houses and drug deals enough times a night to know the battle to get it off the streets is futile. Begins to wonder, “Why not give myself a raise?”

Several months later Diana’s daughter, Brianna D. Strohl, 24, was charged with conspiracy to do a meth cook raise money for her mother’s bail. Short evidently instructed her daughter by phone from a jail phone and the calls were recorded. The daughter faces 6-30 years.

You have to read a lot between the lines here to see the implications.

First, this lady cop certainly knew phone calls from the jail were recorded, but for some reason we can only guess, she wasn’t deterred from talking about committing a felony on a jail phone.

Hmmmm.

Secondly, this officer was raising weed in her home. Is it possible the officers charged with enforcing drug laws aren’t being tested regularly? Even if the cop wasn’t smoking there’s pollen. Pee in a bottle. Hair, clothing, that sort of thing.

The fact is, in the State of New Mexico police officers are almost never given drug tests. During the several years I worked for an agency within the New Mexico Department of Public Safety not one employee of that department was asked to take a drug test.

Now why, one wonders, would that be?

Probably a visit to your own police department, bloggers, will reveal the same is true in your own State Police and local police administrations.

“I can’t answer for you,” Bob Dylan once whined, “You’ll have to decide,

Whether Judas Iscariot had God on his side.”

Jack

Tonight when I went down to Bernalillo to buy my lottery tickets the price on gas, I saw again, is again the highest I’ve ever witnessed in the US.  I’m told the price jumped immediately when the hurricane came in.  I got to talking to a guy outside the store who was obviously taking a break from driving.  Noted his Maryland tags and asked how the gas prices had been along his route.

“Higher than here.  $4 a gallon in Needles, California.  But it’s going to go higher.”

Interesting news.  A person has to wonder how high gasoline can go before it puts a boa-constrictor squeeze on all other consumer spending.  I’d guess, not a lot higher than it’s gone already.

Meanwhile, Public Service Co of NM, has notified customers that charges for gas and electricity will be maybe doubled this winter.  If that’s true here, I’d guess it’s also true elsewhere.

So, I asks myself, what’s happening here?

I’m seeing no assertions that these higher fuel prices have anything to do with the war we’re in, but  they’re coincident with it.

I’m hearing no explanations for fuel prices going up the exact moment when a hurricane comes inland leaving a path of devastation, but from here it appears to opportunistic price-gouging.  The fuel in those tanks couldn’t possibly have cost more as a result of the storm.  It was bought before the storm.  But, the price increase happened to be coincident with the storm in much the way the earlier price increases were coincident with the war.

In ’74, when the Arab oil embargo drove gasoline prices sky-high for those times, Americans got awfully angry about it in fairly short order.  Admittedly, that was before the wussification of the citizenry was complete.

But I’m inclined to believe that if this fuel price situation becomes an enduring feature of American life, there’s no way it can fail to result in inflation, a wintertime disaster to almost match the Hurricane, but concurrent with it, and a lot of Americans who’ve never experienced hunger suddenly knowing there are more important things in life than who won the Super-Bowl.

My pre-wussification mind tells me those Americans will be looking for scapegoats, which might well not be true.  But if Americans discover suddenly that they’ve squandered the legacy of abundance left them by their ancestors, that they’ve sent their industry overseas by sleight of hand, that they’ve elected politicians based on the deadly desire to abdicate responsibility for their own lives, there’s probably going to be a comeuppance.

Today there’s a tender compassion for victims of a disaster.  But the day mightn’t be far distant when Americans turn their backs on those in need because their own needs seem hardly less demanding.

I recall pictures when I was a kid, of Benito Mussolini hanging upside down from a lamp post while his former admirer/worshipers strolled by to spit on the corpse.  That’s because Il Duce quit making the trains run on time.

But that’s all pre-wussification.  No bearing on what happens in America when gasoline prices go to five bucks a gallon and home heating oil doubles in post wussificated America.

Jack

Late 1964, Rex Labor and I were part of a group of Peace Corps trainees on the island of Hilo, Hawaii, whom the Peace Corps decided it could survive without.  They gave us airline tickets back to the mainland, but Rex and I left the plane at Honolulu, planning to go to India on our own, deck hand on a sailboat bound for Australia, something.

Here’s what happened next:

Next day we went looking for work.  Rex took a newspaper and headed down to check out the openings on Waikiki…..I headed for the bars on Hotel Street looking for a job or a hooker to prime me for my job search.  Tomorrow I’d go down to Waikiki to find my busboy job at the Hilton Hawaiian Village.  Today I had more pressing matters.

In a while, I came to a booth with a pretty Gypsy lady; flirted a bit, talked around the issue.  Was certain she was a hooker.  Finally, she demanded, “You want a gypsy good-time?”

“Yeah!  A Gypsy good-time!”

She took me into an attached room with nothing but a cot, sat me down.  “$10″….she took my money and assured she’d be back in a moment.  I sat there and knew when she brought in a snaggle-toothed crone that I’d just lost a sawbuck for another of my lessons in life. 

“Here it is!  A Gypsy goodtime!”  She and the crone danced back and forth in front of me, all of us laughing. 

My life has been rich in gypsy good-times. I’ve been a man wealthy in Gypsy good-times, but that one was best.

A Gypsy-good time when the coconuts fell beside us and mangos piled high under the trees blocking the sidewalks where Rex and I grumbled in our cots picking off sunburned skin to throw to the giant roaches. 

We were young in that country.

From: Day of the Lost Souls
Copyright©2003 Jack Purcell

Rex Labor became a lifelong friend.  Today he’s in China teaching English to adult Chinese.

But the point of this yarn is to convey that I, and maybe a lot of other lottery players obviously don’t mind a Gypsy Goodtime if it’s well conceived and executed.  Probably most of us could even appreciate it.

Probably that crone is dead sometime these last forty years.  Even the younger Gypsy woman’s probably lost to history, not available as a consultant to major lottery operations.

I’m suggesting the lottery management needs to go to the pros, if they want to make a good job of this sort of thing.

There are still plenty around.

Jack

I don’t know when we began giving power to strangers. I think it’s a relatively recent phenomenon. Maybe we watched too many Westerns during our formative years, learned from those steely eyed men in saloons that what strangers think about us is worth a gunfight.

Nowadays the extreme version happens in city traffic. Someone shoots someone else a bird. Next step is an exchange of gunfire.

Here’s how the scenario runs:

Some complete stranger pronounces a bias we don’t share.

Our thought response:

“This offends me.”

That thought process is driven by a deeper one:

“I want to be offended. I give this stranger the power to offend me. I assign enough value to what this stranger says, or believes, to allow it to trigger a negative emotional path within me. What this stranger says or believes matters.”

We know better.

Strangers cut too wide a swath in their traits to have any real value. They span the breadth of potential human biases. But even knowing this we give them the power to ruin a moment.

I say this is a recent phenomenon because humans of the past behaved differently. Our forefathers didn’t care what Brits thought about us because they recognized that Brits live within an entirely different set of interests.

Even today a Zuni doesn’t care what a Navajo thinks about anything because from the perspective of a Zuni, Navajos don’t have anything valid to contribute to any meaningful discussion. Navajos live in a different reality from Zunis.

Both Navajos and Zunis choose to allow themselves to be offended by the opinions of Anglos and Hispanics, but there’s a reason. They’ve found taking offense is a means of gaining power over those groups.

But neither a Zuni, nor a Navajo would bother being offended by the thoughts and words of the other because to each there’s nothing the other might think that carries the weight of validity.

Not long ago the same was true of people almost everywhere. The people in the town where I was reared cared about the opinions of people within that town, but they couldn’t have cared less what the people in Clovis, twenty miles away thought. It was generally understood that Clovis people were stupid and might think and say anything.

Today we care what everyone thinks about almost everything. We pretend to believe what they think carries value, but we know better. We just like the feel of being offended..

Make my day, Stranger! I’m handing you the power to offend me.

This leaves me cold.

Human opinion hasn’t held up well under scrutiny. It’s worth about what it costs. Mine aren’t that reliable and I haven’t found those of others to be any better.

Jack

I see on one of the threads that another major hurricane’s stalking around in the Gulf of Mexico …. threatening New Orleans at the moment.  Brings to mind a lot of strange memories.

One of my careers of this lifetime was spent as State Floodplain Manager for New Mexico… wore another hat with it toward the end, Emergency Management Coordinator with a bit of disaster preparedness thrown in.  I was paid on annual grants to the State by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.  Spent a lot of time off in Emmitsburg, MD, New Orleans, Galveston, Oklahoma City, etc.

I suppose the thing that impressed me most during those years was how thoroughly we’ve boxed ourselves in with regards to natural disasters.  The Gulf Coast filled with people, then pumped out all the petroleum from underneath, so’s to cause the entire region to subside beneath the waves, if not kept out by the intervention of man.  The last time I looked the San Jacinto Monument was threatened.  From the top of that spire you could look around and see nothing but submerged streets that used to be high and dry.

In riverine areas the erosion of banks is undercutting whole neighborhoods inland along rivers almost everywhere if they have any flow.  In California, they’ve built so heavily in wildfire, mudslide and earthquake areas that every tremor assures an enormous amount of damage.

And on and on.

During those sessions at the National Emergency Management Training Center, Emmitsburg, MD, guys in the same job I was in from all the States gathered a week or two at a time.  Evenings we used to sing an old Kingston Trio song:

THE KINGSTON TRIO  – “The Merry Minuet”

(Sheldon Harnick)

They’re rioting in Africa.
They’re starving in Spain.
There’s hurricanes in Florida
And Texas needs rain.
The whole world is festering with unhappy souls.
The French hate the Germans.
The Germans hate the Poles.
Italians hate Yugoslavs.
South Africans hate the Dutch
And I don’t like anybody very much!
But we can be tranquil and thankful and proud
For man’s been endowed with a mushroom shaped cloud.
And we know for certain that some lovely day
Someone will set the spark off
And we will all be blown away.

They’re rioting in Africa.
There’s strife in Iran.
What nature doesn’t do to us
Will be done by our fellow man.

I suppose that just about says it all, except nature doesn’t do it, precisely.  We do it to ourselves.  We build in subsidence areas, riverine flooding areas, earthquake areas, coastal hurricane areas, mudslide and wildfire areas, and we feel fairly put out when it floods, shakes, slides, burns.

But there’s always the president to declare it a disaster, throw in a river of taxpayer money so we can build again in the same location.

Until next time.

Jack