Millions viewed the total eclipse of the sun as it passed along the North American continent in 2017. There is an ancient myth that a solar eclipse will reset your life. Maybe this is our chance like Jimmy Stewart, in It’s a Wonderful Life, to start over and try again. A new lease on life is a welcome gift for most people but if there is any chance of taking a new path, first we need to retrace our steps to see where we went wrong in the first place.
I'm a fan of The Walking Dead series, and surprisingly I learned a few things from watching the show. I’ve been asking myself lately, why are zombie television shows so popular, and it got me thinking... It’s because in a post-apocalyptic world there’s no deadlines to make at the office, no appointments to keep. There's no one telling you to pay for this or pay for that. There's no one saying you can’t go here or you can’t go there. Then it hit me, that even in a world filled with zombies we feel more free than we do in our current society, which brings me to the topic at hand. Do we truly live in a free country?
I remember as a child every year in school we were taught we live in the greatest country in the world. The mantra of freedom has been repeated like a religious chant. We’re taught we live in the freest country in the world. I decided to visit some of the founding father’s own words regarding how the future of this country was intended to look.
We’re taught in school from kindergarten that we live in a democracy. Well, then it makes good sense to look to our forefathers who helped establish this great democracy. Thomas Jefferson said, “It is not only vain, but wicked, in a legislature to frame laws in opposition to the laws of nature, and to arm them with the terrors of death. This is truly creating crimes in order to punish them.” Isn’t it in a person’s nature to provide for their family’s needs?
In our society those who commit crimes to feed their families are labeled as bad, and evil. When a person is willing to sacrifice their own freedom, to put themselves in harm’s way, to place themselves in jeopardy just to make enough money to support their family financially that to me is a person who cares more about others than they do themselves. That is a quality that should never be degraded. Such sacrifice is an exemplar of love and courage.
As a nation we have shamed and humiliated millions of people on top of imprisoning them. It's inhumane to punish people for only trying to make enough money to see that their children have food to eat and a roof over their heads. Robert G. Ingersoll said, “Every crime is born of necessity. If you want less crime, you must change the conditions. Poverty makes crime. Want, rags, crusts, misfortune – all these awake the wild beast in man, and finally he takes, and takes contrary to the law, and becomes a criminal. And what do you do with him? You punish him. What do you do with the criminal? You send him to the penitentiary. Is he made better? Worse. The first thing you do is to try to trample out his manhood, by putting an indignity upon him. You mark him. You put him in stripes. At night you put him in darkness. His feeling for revenge grows. You make a wild beast of him, and he comes out of that place branded in body and soul, and then you won’t let him reform if he wants to.”
If we sat down at a game of monopoly and I gave myself all the money then what recourse would the other player have except to not play or steal some money to get into the game? When he steals if I place him in jail then the game is most certainly rigged because he can never win. When hurricane Irma hit Florida I saw an online article about how a group of people looted some of the local stores. There were many comments calling the looters evil, thieves, and lowlifes.
I’m often surprised to hear comments of this kind instead of how awful it is to be so desperate that you feel the need to steal. Do you really believe that rich people are just morally superior to poor people? Of course not, they just have no need to steal. Why would you steal a one hundred dollar stereo when you have millions of dollars? The unproportionate sentencing to those caught in such acts is obscene and immoral.
A man in Columbia robbed a store for $300 and got sentenced to 3 years in prison. He got a low sentence compared to many. According to USA Today, and some stats they got from the Census Bureau, the average household income is about $65,000 annually. So, if workers on average make upon tens of thousands of dollars a year in income, then how is it proportionate to imprison someone for years for stealing just $300? Shouldn’t that get them in jail for more like a week?
It was William S. Gilbert who said, “Let the punishment fit the crime.” The Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution places a ban against, "cruel and unusual punishment." In the state of Alabama, trafficking in cocaine in an amount under 400 grams nets you a 3-year minimum mandatory sentence. In the state of South Carolina the same charge gets you a 25-year minimum mandatory sentence!
I’m a proud citizen of the State of South Carolina but this is something I’m certainly not proud of. Is a person somehow guiltier by the geographic location they occupy? Do the negative health effects associated with cocaine increase in this state? Do the properties of cocaine become more potent here than they do in the rest of the country?
Thomas Jefferson was hostile to the notion of setting men's laws in opposition to the decrees of nature, and rightly so. It is in a person’s nature to support their family even if it’s accomplished by selling drugs. No different than the car dealer who sells cars to pay his bills. Automobile accidents are one of the leading causes of death and injury in the world today.
Should we imprison the car salesmen for doing his job? Should we imprison car drivers every time they endanger the lives of other citizens by speeding or texting and driving? The argument cited to justify imprisoning millions of citizens for drug possession is the harmful affects it has on people, but more people die from car wrecks than from drugs.
Should we imprison the workers at McDonalds for selling junk food to people? Diabetes and heart disease along with the myriad of health conditions from eating junk food cause more deaths than anything else in this country. Should we imprison citizens for being in possession of foods that are known to endanger your health? Like every time you buy a happy meal you get a simple possession charge.
Should we imprison gun store owners along with those that carry firearms as a recompense for all the victims of senseless gun violence? In the movie Robin Hood Prince of Thieves, Kevin Costner (who plays Robin Hood) is told a young boy must be put to death for the crime of stealing one of the king’s deer. Kevin Costner’s response should be an anthem in abolishing the minimum mandatory sentencing laws. He said, “Isn’t it a greater crime to allow a family to starve?”
Selling drugs is wrong and it’s a crime but it is a greater crime to punish the victims of drugs. We are all equally victims in the community. The person who can’t function as a productive member of society because of their dependence on drugs is a victim. The person who loses a loved one to a drug overdose is a victim. The person who has to risk their very life and freedom just to put food on the table selling drugs is a victim. The people who lose loved ones, imprisoned for decades, sometimes forever, are victims. The officers who enforce the laws that must break apart families in a futile attempt to protect us from ourselves are victims. I know many law enforcement officers share this view on drugs and crime. That's why they created L.E.A.P.
In the 1920’s prohibition era many people died, were imprisoned, were killed, and suffered the awful effects of the ban on alcohol. I don’t think anyone today who walks by wine or beer as they make their way down the store aisle becomes emotionally upset by the poison that is supplied by every local grocer. Those of us who don’t consume it may not like it, but we cannot impose upon others our likes and dislikes.
Thomas Paine said it best, “An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws. He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates his duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.” The best example I can think of, of this, comes conveniently enough from this state. Thomas Ravenel was the treasurer in South Carolina and according to news articles was caught with less than 500 grams of cocaine. For those of you who don’t want to do the conversion in your head, 500 grams is about a half a key. This is the quintessential example of the dog biting its owner. This was a politician who fell into his own bear trap.
Politicians make the laws. They're indifferent when someone they've never met suffers from disastrous policies, but when it affects them they can't help but feel something. Thomas Ravenel probably has some empathy for the victims of these vicious drug laws after serving a prison sentence for drugs himself. He should be a spokesman for reform and repeal of the minimum mandatory sentencing laws but he’s a rich man and connected so he was able to barter a better deal than your average offender. If he were a poor black man he would have served 25 years in prison instead of just the ten months he was sentenced to.
I think Ravenel’s sentence should be a standard of what all offenders of this type face in terms of jail time because 25 years is not a prison sentence, it’s a death sentence. There’s no chance for reform or rehabilitation. Your life is over. Prison terms that last for just months or a few years are short enough that a person still has a chance at a life and to redeem themselves. Again, the punishment should fit the crime. Your entire life should not be taken away unless you’ve taken a life.
Our learning institutions have failed to equip many of our youth with the abilities of a functional citizen. If we obstruct the path to healthy habits and gainful employment we impede the ability to occupy functions that enrich society. For many, to possess the skills necessary to qualify for meaningful employment the government must honor its responsibility to its citizenry. There is a moral duty (politicians) to provide rewarding career opportunities, and education, to such a degree that supplementing income with money gained from illegal or criminal ventures is undesirable.
State facilities should require inmates to obtain diplomas, degrees, and licenses necessary for employment as the requisite for release from incarceration. For this to be viable laws would have to be adapted guarding felons from discrimination by employers. The state should encourage felons to obtain licenses for the type of employment they seek, not ban them from it.
Prisoners can reenter society endowed with the pride that comes from an education and a new sense of purpose. None of this of course negates the necessity that criminals who present a clear and present danger to society (shout out to Harrison Ford!) must be removed from society until such time they are no longer a danger to others. If a prisoner's crime was to maneuver around the law for financial gain then it's society's responsibility to furnish that person with the necessary education and career opportunities to be able to make money without risking their freedom, or being a danger to the rest of society.
Besides the cost to our humanity to lock away another human being in a cage like an animal, incarceration brings with it an unfavorable monetary cost. The average cost of tuition and fees with room and board is twenty thousand dollars a year annually. The average cost of incarcerating a prison inmate in a state facility is thirty-two thousand dollars a year. In some states the cost of housing a prison inmate for a year is greater than the cost of tuition at Harvard University.
Paying ninety six thousand dollars to keep a thief from stealing a two thousand dollar watch is impractical. Paying more to send someone to prison than it would cost to send them to college is immoral. It would be cheaper to give the thief a watch than to imprison him. Jacque Fresco is the first guy I’ve heard make that point. Fresco is a brilliant philosopher. If future generations achieve a utopian civilization he may get the credit for being the spark that started us on the road to a new and better society.
Thomas More said, “For if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves and then punish them.” I know for half the people out there this message falls on deaf ears. They must be thinking why this battle. Why would you pick this cross to bear? Of all the fights it may seem like the least sensible choice to fight for the rights of criminals and prisoners. Why defend the dregs of society, so they’re called?
I get it, I really do. It’s easy to think that way, but listen to Oscar Wilde, he can enlighten you as to why this fight is the good fight, and why this fight is the one we should all be fighting. This is the fight of our generation and it’s up to us to win it. Oscar Wilde said, “As one reads history, not the expurgated editions written for schoolboys and pass-men, but in the original authorities of each time, one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalized by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime.”
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| "Punishment is justice for the unjust." —Saint Augustine |
The Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the Salem Witch Trials are all examples of the habitual employment of punishment. Even on 9/11 the Jihadists thought they were punishing the wicked. Of course they weren’t doing God’s work anymore than the people who thought they were burning witches. This is why Thomas Paine warned of an avidity to punish. This is why Jesus warned the mob, “He who is without sin cast the first stone.”
If we advocate punishment over rehabilitation as a means of dealing with infractions, when we find ourselves in opposition to someone else, they naturally will view us as the bad guy and consequently the one who must be punished. If on the other hand we support therapy and education as a means of dealing with our enemies, when a consensus is reached against us such that we find ourselves on the wrong side of a dispute, the weapons of justice will uplift us and improve society as a whole. In such a society, failure and mistakes will be the catalyst for our enrichment, instead of our destruction. Better to be removed from society to be given a college education with which to reenter society than to spend the rest of your days rotting in a cell as day by day you fade to oblivion.
Under the current system a prison sentence is a death sentence. A college sentence on the other hand is a prescription to live. The Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, and the Salem Witch Trials are something that happened a long time ago. There are thousands of modern examples of peaceful communities being brutalized by the habitual employment of punishment on YouTube.
There's a video of Portland police officers threatening to arrest people for trying to take food into a homeless shelter. There’s a similar video of police doing the same thing in Florida where they actually do arrest an elderly man for giving food to the homeless three separate times. There’s a video of a woman with a van full of kids being shot at in New Mexico by police officers when she failed to sign a traffic ticket. There’s several videos of children being harassed and threatened by cops for skate boarding in public places.
When our society places a restriction upon children from playing, then we know we have reached the point Thomas Jefferson warned us about, where we are literally creating crimes in order to punish them. Thomas Jefferson was one of the founding fathers of our country, one of the principle authors of the Declaration of Independence, and the third president of the United States. This man held the highest office in our country and tried to warn us. We just need to listen.
Chances are you yourself have been affected or someone you care about by strict laws that are indifferent to a person’s circumstance or situation. There should be a Common Sense law passed that allows for a human element in legislature and puts empathy back into law. In the state of Texas the jury decides the verdict in a criminal trial. They also decide the sentence. A far more free system and American system than what we have here in South Carolina.
In South Carolina the jury isn’t even allowed to know what sentence the crime carries much less be the one to decide the sentence. The defendant isn’t allowed to address the jury and it’s expressly written in the law that the defense is not allowed to ask the jury to put themselves in your position because god knows empathy allows too much humanity in our justice system! It’s obvious this was written into law to keep the jury from feeling sorry for the defendant, to keep the jury from feeling anything, to stamp out the human element. Rule 141 (b) in SC criminal rules cites the abolition of empathy in the court room.
I plead with the poverty stricken and impoverished of this nation. To the children in the inner city ghettos, to the immigrants in search of a better life, to the families of the Appalachian Mountains who live below the poverty line. The aristocrats, the politicians, the rich, they are not the victims of harsh laws and so they may not listen to your pain. They may not hear your suffering, they may be indifferent, but I’m not. They may never change the laws to give you a fair shake but you can change to give yourself a fighting chance.
A good and relevant education is the key to freedom, even under oppression. The slaves brought from Africa were not allowed to learn to read and write. Slave owners knew it would be easier to oppress someone devoid of an education. I recently watched the movie Hidden Figures. In the 1960’s, in a time when our country’s laws routinely oppressed women and blacks, black women were able to get jobs at the highest scientific institution in our country. How is that possible? They possessed a valuable quality, an education.
Despotism thrives on oppression and is a system built on the backs of the poor by denying them an education. This is a practice that continues to this day. That’s why the government uses tax money from your district to pay for your child’s education, so that if you live in a poor community you get a poor education. Rich communities have a larger school budget to hire the best teachers, to build the best schools, and to provide the best resources. To give every child in the country an equal opportunity to succeed, the money from all over the country should be put into a pot then divided evenly among all the school districts in the country. This will ensure that each child gets an equal education.
Those in power may never change the laws to help those who need help. Thanks to men like Sal Khan with the creation of his website Khan Academy, and other sites like it, you can now take your education into your own hands. All you need is a laptop and internet access. Log in to Khan Academy to gain access to a world class education. Take your future and your life into your own hands and out of the hands of those that whether intentionally or through blind neglect oppress you.
Oppression is a long standing tradition of those in power to retain their wealth by rigging the game, keeping those in poverty impoverished. If you’re poor you’re oppressed regardless of your color. If you’re middle classed you’re far closer to being poor than you are to being rich. Every family without insurance who went bankrupt to pay for a child’s surgery they couldn’t afford knows this. Every family that lost their homes in the housing market crash knows this. Every person drowning in debt from student loans knows this. Every middle class family that woke up to find themselves on the wrong side of the poverty line now knows that only the aristocracy and the truly wealthy are immune from oppressive laws.
You may not be able to change the law, or start your life with an amount of money equal to what rich people are born into but you can certainly give yourself an equal education. With free online education you don't have to be rich to get a good education. Arm yourself with knowledge. Educate yourself, free yourself, become the leaders of tomorrow. Then help free the rest of us.
For those without an education, those in pain, those that suffer, for those without a vote, speak out, let your voice be heard. Get on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or write a letter to your congressman. If you have a father, or a mother, or a brother, or a son in prison, speak out. If you have concerns or complaints about how laws affect your community, speak up and speak out.
The ancient oligarchy established an insidious device to infect your right to free speech. Prayer effectively removes your voice by having you communicate your concerns, desires, and complaints through, let’s call it, a one way phone line. A culture that promotes the free expression of ideas allows the dissemination of information to flow freely throughout society. It doesn’t stifle it.
Oligarchs subdue their subjects by not only being the loudest voice in society but by being the only voice. They accomplish this by broadcasting their own propaganda while at the same time funneling the voice of the people into silence (aka prayer). Long before there were printing presses, books including the Holy Bible were copied by scribes. Writers were conscripted to copy books by hand.
Do you really think that someone of royalty or nobility would take the time to copy a twelve hundred page book? I don’t think so. They were too busy getting Swedish massages, eating grapes while getting fanned with a feather, and eating at large banquet tables to spend countless, tedious, meticulous, boring hours copying books word for word. That was a job for peasants, scholars no doubt, but still not royalty.
Everyone’s heard the expression, “divide and conquer” and everyone’s heard the Illuminati’s maxim, “order out of chaos.” These strategies were mobilized centuries before any one of us were born. The barons of the ancient world ordered scribes to place ideology in the Bible that they knew would help them to control their subjects. Such as the idea of people being bad. So that any time a person or a group of people had a disagreement or a dispute with another person or group it would quickly devolve into a conflict. Because if you’re good and someone else is against you then logically it follows they must be bad.
We know that bad behavior is condemned such that when we assign that behavior to someone we feel justified in punishing them. Thus, the elite have effectively rendered us helpless against their control by keeping us fighting amongst ourselves. The indoctrination to follow was just the beginning of a campaign that would be sustained until the modern day. A patriarchal order of priests became fear mongers for the rulers of the dark ages. Instead of spreading the truth that we’re all one. And the human race is a single organism that thrives in love and brotherhood and the proliferation of free ideas.
In human nature there is a delicate symbiosis that must be maintained for us to flourish. To ignore this fundamental reality will only lead to human misery. The deterioration of effective communication throughout the human race was propagated by implanting the belief that the hearts deepest desires are best plunged into the abyss of silence. Pray, pray, pray was the prescription of the day, and faith, faith, faith.
Intelligent people of course would have rejected the idea of faith (of foregoing their ability to reason being a good thing). Naturally there was criticism against the concept of keeping all requests, complaints, and ideas inside yourself instead of sharing in counsel and community. Those people were cut down and silenced with the Inquisition and the Crusades. What the nobility didn’t count on is a subversive scribe sabotaging their plan to control the people, and a future destabilization of their religious empire. The scribes knew they would face sudden death if they didn’t copy and translate the Bible as directed. So, they cleverly and secretly embedded messages into the Bible, hoping that someone someday would discover their telltale trail of bread crumbs to the truth.
I found certain passages in the Bible that to say the least struck me as quite odd and not in keeping with the general theme of the Bible. When putting all these passages together you get a clear picture that starts to form. The people who were forced to make copies and translations of the Bible counted on the despots to not understand translations into foreign languages and their complacency.
They tried to warn us from the very beginning. In the book of Genesis we find the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. It’s odd that in this story God didn’t want Adam and Eve to know the difference between right and wrong. Further along in Genesis we come to the story of the Tower of Babel. We're presented with the same oddity as before. God doesn’t seem to want the human race to have attributes that all of us would value.
Let’s just hear it directly from the words of the text itself, in Genesis it says, “And the Lord said, behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.” I was really surprised the first time I read this. I didn’t expect to read in the Bible that God didn’t want people to be able to effectively communicate with each other. He wanted to divide the people, and to confuse them, and keep them from accomplishing great things.
It was upon reading this story that I thought maybe it’s not God they’re talking about but the writer is dropping hints about the sinister motives of the oligarchy. So, I began to keep my eye out for more hints and sure enough I found more, lots more. In the New Testament in the book of Matthew in chapter 13 in verses 9-16, the writer here specifically mentions talking in secret code so that only those who are the intended recipient will understand. It's like he’s trying to tell us to look for hidden messages in the text.
The most famous version of the Bible is named after a king. I’m sure it was their king who forced the scribes to put into the text to pray in secret in the book of Matthew in chapter 6 in verses 5 and 6. To stifle society’s ability to communicate as the scribes hinted at in Genesis with the story of the tower of babel. It’s no doubt the oligarchs who want to keep us uneducated as the scribes hinted at in Genesis with the story of the tree of knowledge being forbidden. It had to be the scribes that were trying to hint at our symbiotic nature in the book of Luke in chapter 17 in verses 20 and 21 where it states the kingdom of God is within each one of us.
They tried to tell us again in several gospels in the New Testament where it says to not judge one another but to love one another. Thomas Paine makes the distinction well between society which is our natural instinct to work together and government which is there to tether our baser impulses. In his well known work titled Common Sense he wrote, “Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the later negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher. Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one.”
Every person should be offended to live according to rules that allow another human being to go without food. There should be public outcry and outrage at the sight of homelessness and starvation. You should be outraged at the cost of a higher education excluding those that can’t afford it. You should be heartbroken for those that have died because they didn’t have health insurance and couldn’t afford the care they needed. We should be in awe and horror at how frequent human beings are locked away in cages like animals for decades for the slightest offense.
When you speed your putting someone’s very life in danger, but for that infraction you only get a speeding ticket. When you use or sell drugs the risk for damage to health is there as it is when speeding except that less people are hurt by drugs than by automobiles, yet the penalties for drugs are twenty years in prison instead of a fine. Infractions should be punished. Laws broken should have consequences but rehabilitation is a college level education not sitting in an eight-foot by six-foot cell all day. Reintegration is a diploma, degree, or business license, not twenty years in prison. It’s hard work to get a diploma. It’s that accomplishment that earns a person’s right to be called a citizen and earns their place back in society again.
Because of the New Testament law of "turn the other cheek" most people view the Old Testament law as strict, and "eye for an eye" as ruthless, but consider our own laws today. How many prisoners would rather have their hands cut off for stealing than to sit in prison for twenty years? All of them. If we went back to the Old Testament law of eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, we’d be making a step in the right direction.
Our inclination would lead us to think that going back to Old Testament law would make punishment more severe, but actually our current laws are far more ruthless than anything from the Old Testament. If we only took away a person’s life if they took a life then millions of people serving twenty, thirty, forty, and fifty year sentences for selling drugs would be released. If we lived by the statute of, eye for an eye, then a court could only break apart someone's family and destroy their life if they first have done the same. Eye for an eye would mean that if you stole five hundred dollars then you are forced to work in a prison work camp earning minimum wage until you can pay back the five hundred dollars.
If a robbery is committed under threat of physical violence then a restitution should be added to the money that has to be paid back. A violent offender should have to take a course in anger management or some kind of rehabilitation therapy. Earning a diploma or degree ought to be a requirement for release from incarceration so that upon being released the option to steal is wholly undesirable. Sounds like a lot but it’s far less punishment than sitting in a prison cell for twenty or thirty years, and it’s more productive for the person who committed the crime and for society.
We all know that two topics guaranteed to start an argument are politics, and religion. It follows then that there will inevitably be people who get offended by this article but to that I say good. I intend to live up to my namesake. In the English language my last name actually means “to provoke” and that’s exactly what I intend to do, to provoke discussion, to provoke discourse, to provoke emotion. Emotion that for far too long has been stifled by the politics we have, stifled by the culture of today. A culture fostered by the powerful because those that make the laws don’t want you to feel (certainly not empathy for your fellow man). They want you to accept that anyone who is punished deserves it because they’re bad, they’re a criminal, they’re an outlaw. They've devised a culture such that no matter who you are, no matter what you’re circumstance, people will look the other way when your being fitted for the hangman’s noose.
How many prisoners would trade the unending nightmare of their waking reality for a hangman’s noose? Jobs and degrees would save many of the kids today who without those two things would become our prisoners of the future or our homeless, or provide the body to fill a grave plot. What a devious sleight of hand for the aristocracy of the 1700’s to gain control over a population seeking to escape tyranny in the new world with the illusion of democracy.
You have the right to vote for your leader but not the right to nominate your choices. You have the right to vote but not the right to vote for which laws are passed. In this country you have the right to remain silent and under the current voting system you will. Silence is the toll each citizen must pay for the politicians to continue preserving the status quo. They need to take away your voice to sustain laws that are indifferent to the poor, the uneducated, and the desperate.
Look for the fine print on the Statue of Liberty underneath where it says give me your tired, your hungry, your poor. If you look close enough you might just see a stamp that says department of corrections. To invoke change we must act. Write a letter to your congressman, post a blog, take to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and to the street with signs and posters. Give a voice back to the people.
It was President Ronald Reagan who said, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.” I say those days are upon us and we must fight to regain our freedom. Fight with truth by using our voice. We must protest like they did in the 70’s. We must protest like they did in the times of Gandhi.
Ronald Reagan also said, “Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves.” That’s the most adequate description one could appoint to the drug war. The entire country is sick of the drug war. Even many of the police officers whose duty it is to arrest drug dealers, to the judges who hand out the sentences, to the correction officers who must guard the prisoners. Not just those that have died, or lost their freedom, or lost someone they care about.
On both sides of the drug war we stand in awe of the devastation it has brought to families and to communities. We need reformation in this country. We need absolution in this country. We need a savior. One will only arrive when we realize every man, woman, and child must stand up against this egregious policy of war on drugs.
The war on drugs as it stands is a civil war that has turned society in on itself. A proportion of society turned into prisoners with an equal proportion tasked to enslave them, while those that remain count the bodies. The nurses and doctors know the toll. The bystander and the innocent see the devastation and most feel the effects in their own lives. No one is unaffected.
May we unite to bring an end to the drug war, to bring an end to mandatory minimums, to bring an end to for profit prisons. Let's bring an end to for profit private colleges. An education should be an inalienable right under the constitution.
Let's bring an end to for profit health care. Treatment when you’re sick regardless of class or financial status should be an inalienable right under the constitution. The availability of a job that pays enough to support and feed yourself should be an inalienable right. When the economy fails to produce sufficient jobs to satisfy the surplus population the government should step in to feed and shelter those who were left out in the cold in an economic game of musical chairs.
We don’t let another human being starve or we must accept that we live in a human uncivilization. I leave you with the knowledge that our fate is in our hands. Each citizen must play an active part in this democracy or we are left to the whims of a few aristocrats, and oligarchs. I leave you with the safekeeping of our freedom and the duty to protect it.
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