A Different Kind of Drug Problem

They also drugged their children into thinking "Might make Right." Instead of dialog and thinking, they taught that it is OK to simply use their larger size to force a decision without evaluation of the consequences . . . mindless, unthinking, force based behavior.

Bob Wilson

 

Overall, folks WERE more civilized and polite back then. Now we have become a bunch of decadent and selfish amoral crackpots

 

Back then?

• Kennedy shot
• Kennedy shot
• King shot
• Birmingham bomb
• Evers shot
• Kent State
• Wallace shot

No generation has an exclusive claim to civilization and the absence of decadent, selfish, amoral crackpots. We can find examples across history although it has gotten better since the age of enlightenment. Progress is painfully slow.

Bob Wilson

 

I don't mean at a perceived national level. I mean at the local level. Ex, my folks never used to lock their doors or take the keys out of the ignition until the late 1980's

 

In my neck of the woods, we only lock our car doors during zucchini season.

Bob Wilson

 

To paraphrase: "Parents don't beat their children enough nowadays."

I suspect that our social problems are more complicated than the simplistic idea that parents are too lax with their kids. There are fewer social problems when there is a strong sense of community. Large cities, a high level of migration, extremes of wealth and poverty, and a police force that is seem as coming from outside and that regards the residents as "not us", all contribute to the deterioration of community. I also blame the consumerist economy which uses propaganda methods to generate demand for goods many of the viewers cannot afford, and which leads people into anti-social means of acquiring wealth.

However, many of the problems we perceive today were also present back in the day when parents beat their children into obedience. Wife-beating, gangsterism, and theft are not new problems. Drugs were not a big social problem in the 1920's because they were legal. If you wanted to ruin your life with drugs you didn't have to buy them from gangsters, with all the attendant street wars over turf.

 

Back in the day there weren't meth labs because meth wasn't invented and/or the locals didn't know enough Chemistry to make it, and as Daniel mentioned, if it's legal it isn't a problem. I believe we have more "problems" because we have more lawyers & politicians. A century of legislation sure cleaned up the "drug problem" in the USA.

Change the names & change the dates & I believe you'll find Man hasn't changed very much over the millenia.

 

I'm curious if your parents lock their doors now because of an incident where they were burglarized? I rarely lock mine and probably will keep it that way until something happens, or I get older and more cautious (like my parents have done).

 

Here's another problem: The private prison lobby!

There are at least two aspects of the prison lobby: In some states there are privately run prisons which are paid according to how many prisoners they hold, and there are companies that sell services, equipment, and supplies to prisons, as well as construction companies that build prisons. All these businesses profit from increased numbers of prisoners, and so they lobby very hard for more laws and harsher sentences.

And nobody is lobbying in an organized manner for fewer laws and shorter sentences, other than the marijuana industry, which is now very big business.

So we have people lobbying to make more things illegal, and lobbying for harsher laws, not out of a concern for civic safety, but purely because they make money off of imprisonment. Making victimless activities crimes pushes them into the purview of gangsters, and everybody suffers, except the prison industry and the gangsters, both of which profit.

Lawyers and lobbyists making the nation less safe by turning formerly legal activities into crimes, and then imposing ever-longer sentences on them!

Spanking kids, or washing their mouths out with soap for using the Anglo-Saxon word for a thing instead of the Latin word (i.e. "f**k" instead of "intercourse") is not going to improve matters any. But releasing the present prison population and incarcerating all the lobbyists in their place would go some ways toward making things better.

 

We also didn't have child abuse (physical or sexual) or domestic violence problems either. Primarily because we swept nearly all of it under the rug and refused to acknowledge it. What problem?

After two decades of dealing with its slice of this 'only in America' problem, Rome is now learning that this problem is similarly prevalent worldwide.

My hometown community didn't have a drug abuse problem because (1) the modern illicit drug wave hadn't quite yet reached there, and (2) alcohol was not then generally considered a drug, no matter how widely it was abused.

 

"My parents" should be considered past tense as neither are alive. But they had a burglary in 1994, at their condo in Winnipeg, that left them badly shaken.

They went from being trusting, kind people, to having a monitored alarm system and locking themselves securely in their space while at home.

Sounds like terrorism, instilling fear. Therefore, all criminals are terrorists