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ATLANTIC HIGHLANDS HERALD |
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AMERICA THE BUSYBODY Question: Is America turning into the biggest collection of busybodies in the world? Answer: No – we’ve been there for a long time. Our busybody pedigree traces far back to the settling of the New World. Spaniards immediately set about converting the Indians wherever they went, usually at the point of the sword. (Early missionary work was somewhat different from today’s kinder and gentler style.) Settlers of New England – popularly called pilgrims – made a big deal out of coming here for “religious freedom”. But they really meant their religious freedom, not necessarily yours – particularly if you hadn’t received the same revelation they had. Both Connecticut and Rhode Island were founded in reaction to some of the uglier attitudes of the Massachusetts Bay colony. In the olden days, the state that now thinks gay marriage is a swell idea was pretty tough on “heretics”. (Think “Salem Witch Trials” to get my meaning.) Next, we fought a huge war – nearly destroying the country “in order to save it”. Each of two groups of states wanted to do things its own way. Actually, one group wanted to go their own way and form their own country to practice their “peculiar” institution (i.e., slavery). The other group said, “nothing doing.” The latter, being bigger and stronger, won the argument and abolished the peculiar institution, too. One observer called it, “a very bloody affair”. Late in the 19th century reformers got cranked up about the social damage being done by alcohol – even children often started drinking in the morning – and grew into a political movement. By the second decade of the 20th century they were strong enough to pass a Constitutional Amendment (the 18th, also called the Volstead Act) which prohibited commercial production, transport and sale of alcoholic beverages. You could make your own beer or bathtub gin and drink yourself silly, but you couldn’t legally buy a drink anywhere. Huge criminal enterprises quickly sprang up. Fortunes were made from a vast underground commerce whose purpose was slaking Americans’ unquenchable thirst for beer, wine and spirits. Even people who cared little about booze became drinkers (and lawbreakers) “on principle” or because it seemed “in”. Organized crime was bankrolled and established. The Noble Experiment hopelessly corrupted every layer of government and law enforcement. Ultimately, even the reformers turned against their experiment and asked for repeal of the Volstead Act. When FDR was elected, undoing Prohibition was his first task. Americans have, it seems, an irresistible urge to outlaw anything they think is “bad”. If enough people of like mind can get together, a new law against something results. A century ago most drugs were legal and available. Heroin and morphine were touted as treatments for alcoholism before their addictive properties were realized. The fictional Sherlock Holmes alternated between cocaine and heroin to defeat the ennui of inactivity (although Dr. Watson disapproved). Coca Cola had that “pinch” of cocaine to “pick you up”. Its name still evokes that now-scandalous past. Once “reform”, as a political movement, got rolling, we enacted laws making possession and use of most drugs – excepting coffee and tobacco – illegal, except by a doctor’s prescription. Americans had decided drugs were “bad”. They had to be outlawed. Conversely, we had to agree that alcohol was “good” in order to make its legalization ethically acceptable. Films of the 1930s and ‘40s shamelessly pushed drinking – shockingly so, by today’s standards. Today, we have 10 million-plus alcoholics. We suffer billions in damage and thousands of deaths, annually, from alcohol-related automobile accidents. Kids show up drunk at school – sometimes even in the elementary grades. We call it an “illness” and turn a blind eye because we know we can’t make the stuff illegal again. We tried that, and it didn’t work. Is outlawing drugs working any better than alcohol prohibition did? You tell me. A huge criminal network – so powerful that it actually interferes with control of our borders – handles most illegal drug commerce, world-wide. Its profits reach $100 billion a year, by some estimates. That exceeds the Gross Domestic Product of all but the top 26 countries in the world. Short of entering a virtual state of war with countries producing the stuff, there seems to be no possible way to stop it. Besides, a vast enforcement infrastructure has grown up around the illegal industry. How would the rice bowls of all those cops, lawyers, judges, bailiffs, doctors, etc., be filled if the drug problem suddenly went away? We’re stuck in a war we can’t win, but can’t possibly quit. We can all agree: drugs are bad stuff. But is outlawing them really the best way? Worst of all, we can’t seem to learn from history – meaning that we are doomed to repeat it. In the 1960s, the country was shocked – shocked! – to learn that cigarette-smoking was bad for your health (duh!). Since that time we have been inexorably moving toward outlawing tobacco. We’re all but there now, as whole towns declare they are “smoke-free zones”. Cigarette taxes are so high in some locales that smugglers are bringing in truckloads of smokes from low-tax southern states to sell on the black market. We’re chasing tobacco-criminals from pillar to post while real bad guys are streaming across the Mexican border with serious crime and terrorism on their minds. (Smoke-free might be OK, but could we be bomb-free first?) But the glorious zenith of the nanny state is still ahead of us. Now we’re starting to talk about levying extra taxes on high-fat and high-sugar foods to save us from obesity. Groups of lawyers are planning class-action lawsuits against ice cream, fast-food restaurant chains, and makers of soda-pop. Charts of ideal weight vs. height for American men and women now look like standards from Dachau, ca. 1943. And every emaciated person in the country is writing books and lecturing the rest of us on how to get thin. Could we pleeeeze have a moratorium on people of stick-figure lineage advising plump middle-agers like myself – one of my grandmothers weighed 480 pounds! – on how to reach that ideal concentration-camp physique? Enough, already, with the stories about how you lost five pounds! Think about it this way: what if all those giant pro basketball players decided to advise us on how to grow tall – telling us what foods to eat and what exercises to do? We’d laugh, because everyone knows height is genetically determined. But is it? A woman told me she was two inches taller than her identical twin sister. She thought it was because she exercised more. Tall people could really become a pain, and end up persecuting short people terribly, if they somehow gained enough political power to enact “height-enhancement” laws. I don’t think they will, but the persecution of chubby people is already well under way. We need to cut it out. When I was a kid, we resisted highhanded attempts to push us around by saying, “it’s a free country.” Try to remember when you last heard that. And think seriously about the kind of country we are becoming. People should be able to smoke, drink, fool around, and eat a hot dog or a candy bar without being harassed. The taxes on simple pleasures shouldn’t produce black markets. And people of plump physique – once a mark of prosperity, before Hollywood decided only thin is beautiful – deserve to live their lives without someone constantly being on their case.
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