A. Blinken I went down canyon to the city the other day and when I came out of a Megamaxamondo Mart dragging six plastic bags of cheap food, a delicate, elderly woman in a robin’s egg blue suit and blue rinsed hair planted herself in front of me and shoved a petition under my nose. "Do you love America," she asked me. "Excuse me," I said, trying to step around her. "Read this, young man. If you love America you’ll sign these petitions to finally force our elected officials to follow the law. There is a northward flow of criminals, young man. These criminals take our jobs and clog our health care system with their children." "Pardon me, Ma’am," I said, "these bags are heavy, I’d like to get to my car." "Put them down, our country is at stake. These people have broken the law! Are you a patriot, or not?" "Look, you bitter old bitch, get out of my way." "You’re no patriot!" "Not true, I love to look at pictures of young men in uniform." She finally let me pass, and out of the corner of my eye I saw her go to her folding table and squirt some of that sterno stuff on her hands to purify herself from me. People with her world view really freak me out; here’s why: First of all, people who have a fetish for law and obedience are both brainless and hypocritical. Everyone breaks laws; we mostly want laws enforced only on people not like us. Also, laws aren’t like the Ten Commandments, they don’t come from God or anyone remotely like God. They mostly come from committees. At heart is either a witless and short sighted attempt to do good, or simple coercion by lobbyists on vote seeking grand-standers. Most laws, like drug laws and prostitution laws, make the problem they seek to solve worse. I consider myself to be very law abiding, but that’s because I only count the handful of laws that make sense to me, like "don’t dump oil on the ground" or "don’t take other people’s stuff" and most of all, "play nice and be fair with one another." I ignore a whole raft of laws that I know are crap. Anyone who confuses the law with what is moral and right is, as I said, brainless. Second, a patriot is not someone who blindly follows whatever paid political liar is in the news. Being a patriot means taking responsibility for your government. A real patriot demands the lunkheads temporarily running the show behave according to certain principles of rightness, like, "don’t invade other nations" and "don’t pollute the whole world" and "don’t give guns to thugs and dictators." A real patriot also insists that laws don’t create more harm than they prevent. Patriots insist that laws are far sighted, and don’t simply punish the person closest to the problem. To me, the Blue Fascist, as I have come to think of her, and people like her have it completely backwards. Instead of hoping that cruel and arbitrary laws will protect your neighborhood and your nation from change, accept that everyone deserves to live in our nation, no matter how different from you they are. Take responsibility for the people you voted for, make them accountable for the narrowness of their vision and the harm their laws cause. Don’t confuse right and wrong with law and justice; they’ve almost nothing in common. Seriously, it’s enough to make me feel like rinsing my hair and finding a robin’s egg blue suit and a petition to jam under people’s noses, except that people who believe like I do aren’t good at telling others what to do, so we have no petitions.

Mountainy Misery

A. Blinken..... My belief in this matter is founded on 25 years of knowing people, seeing their stories, the choices they make, the results. Of all cruel, self-serving legislation, probably the hardest on rural people has been the war on drugs. It has brought misery to little towns, Indian Lands and mountainy folk everywhere. These areas are traditionally poor; families often pool income and resources, and people do many things to get by. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe in using most drugs; I don’t take most of the crap my doctor gives me. But I long ago learned that all a prohibition does is separate people out. Rural people are already separated from a society that’s composed of urban and suburban values. Teachers and guidance councilors funnel kids out of rural areas, and those who want to stay have few choices for employment. The drug war has kept the price of cannabis and all illegal drugs artificially high, encouraging rural people to participate in production and encouraging young people, in particular, to invest in temporary things, since cash is hard to invest long term (thanks to "anti drug" rules on spending cash). This encourages a short-term world-view. Very bad people migrate to rural areas to escape detection; they bring technology, influence and networking to the markets in the city. I consider the spread of meth to rural and Indian people to be one of the worst "unintended consequences" of the drug war. I once heard an Indian activist say, "we take your garbage, we give you gambling, we make your meth." It’s easy to see it happen, and easy to understand why. I’ve seen how meth labs have followed cannabis gardens, not because cannabis causes you to do meth, but because especially young cannabis growers are introduced to meth users and dealers when they market their weed. They tend to have to work long hours and mountainy growers often have to work hard on steep terrain; meth gives one the strength of ten. Of course, it gives you the strength of ten today by robbing twenty tomorrows. Since pot growers are already used to thinking of themselves as criminals, it’s a shorter step to making meth. A thousand dollars worth of meth is a lot easier to get to the city than a thousand dollars worth of pot, which is large and aromatic. These forces nudge good local people to descend into criminality and meth use. Drug war insanity has caused a lot of us to regard cops and justice and government in general as a sham. The despicable and mercenary behavior of cops and D.A.s has trampled our values of fair play and appropriate punishment. I’ve heard a first hand account of a woman who called the cops because her boyfriend beat her up; when they came, they found a greenhouse full of pot in the back yard. Their attention diverted (I guess they thought the plants might try to run away if they waited) so the S.O.B. was free to beat her for calling the cops and the woman was forced to run screaming down the road to find shelter at a neighbor’s house. Cops are free to lie, free to use truly bad criminals to buy "information" on common folk which may or may not be true. I’ve seen people busted, their land taken away, and then given the opportunity to re-purchase their land at 1/3 it’s value, due the following October. The folks did the only thing they could: they grew another crop and bought their land back. I know someone who got charged with seven different crimes for selling one eighth-ounce bag of pot. (Possession for sale, keeping a place where drugs are sold {his car} transportation for sale, conspiracy to sell control substances, and so on.) I know a woman who, when she was seven months pregnant, was forced to lay in a muddy yard with plastic "zip tie" handcuffs on for nearly an hour. She wasn’t involved with anything, she was visiting her friend in a back house, but the cops wanted to know where everyone was. I’ve talked with people who have had their houses literally destroyed in a search for "drug profits". When the cops behave worse than the criminals they’re chasing, we’re losing ground as a society. The drug war was created and is maintained not to stop the use or production of drugs, but to support a mighty industry of cops, social workers, propagandists, lawyers, judges, jailers, councilors and so on and on. This is why the drug war has been most efficient at perpetuating and escalating the drug war. Ever wonder why your local cop organizations lobby so hard to keep drugs illegal? It isn’t your best interest, it’s job security. Just about everybody on the drug war gravy train is seen as some kind of expert, but most aren’t, they’re just bureaucrats who only know what they’re told, and what they’re told is that there is only one way to deal with human intoxication: war. The drug war and its propaganda have robbed all of us of essential, basic freedoms. We’re willing to allow nearly any violation of privacy and search and seizure, as long as drugs are implicated, any violation, even of our own bodies. No free people would tolerate such laws, and a capitalist people, more than any other, should understand the laws of supply and demand. None of us want meth to be made freely in our canyons, but under the war, it is being made here, even though you can‘t buy a decent anti-histamine off the shelf. Meth makes a person feel OK; that’s mostly what people want. If you don’t want people making and selling and buying and using meth, then make some safe, legal alternative available, and allow people to return to society instead of remaining forever drug outcasts. You wouldn’t eat a sandwich made where most meth is made; users know that. Give them a better alternative and they’ll use it. Cannabis never should have been prohibited; if you think it’s dangerous, produce some scientific facts, not propaganda, and let intelligent adults decide for themselves whether to use it. That’s what "liberty" means, the ability to decide for yourself. Don’t believe the drug war propaganda, don’t participate. Insist that our masters find a better way to deal with the ravages of drug abuse than war and prison. Drug abuse is a medical and social problem, not a law enforcement problem. The war isn’t on drugs, it’s on people, and this war has made prisoners of us all.

Knock on the door

A. Blinken The other night there was a knock on the door and I was terrified to open it to a state cop. Seeing him there filled me with dread, my heart pounded, my mouth got dry. "How can I help you?" "Are you A. Blinken?" For an instant I thought of lying, but I said, "yeah." I was struggling to control my shaking hands. "Can I come in?" I sure as hell didn’t want him in my house, but he might decide to come in anyway. I decided to make him walk over me. "I’m sorry, I’m kind of busy. What is this about?" "There was a fatality accident recently, and you were identified at the scene." He showed me a photo of the license plate and bed of my truck taken by a highway camera. "Is this a picture of your pickup? Were you driving your pickup on the date at the top?" Since my pickup was right behind him, I said, "yeah, I was driving, but I couldn’t tell you much about it. I was just trying to get the hell out of town, there were cars and semis all around me going like they were fleeing a burst dam. All of a sudden the semi ahead of me swerved and slammed his brakes on. That’s all I know." He nodded, thanked me and left. I closed the door and leaned against it, my heart pounding. Whoever said "if you haven’t done anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about" was a dimwit. Believe me, we’ve all done something wrong. There are millions of laws, you literally can’t spit without breaking a law. Further, guilt or innocence come much later, in court. Between the knock on the door and the jury’s decision is a lot of time spent with cops and criminals, and like any vacation, it’s every expensive, with booking fees, court fees, lawyers, bail. If you jerk your arm away from a cop, you’re guilty of numerous charges; if he kills you as a result, he gets a couple of days off with pay. And, even if you’re eventually found innocent, you have a police record for life, with an arrest for whatever. Cops usually charge you with everything they possibly can, the DA sorts it out later, so you end up with an arrest record for some pretty astounding stuff. If they drop the charges, you still suffer. If you are actually guilty of anything, you’ll be charged with everything. The average person has no idea how out of control "justice" has become. Our public servants have chopped up every act and made each step its own law to break, break one, break them all, like dominos. And, if you did it with friends, you are charged with conspiracy. Like the bullets of the automatic weapons cops now carry to "protect" us, the charges, too, arrive in a barrage. You have to be blinded by philosophy not to see that this kind of police activity doesn’t happen in a country that values justice. The innocent shouldn’t suffer: if they don’t find drugs in your car, they should have to put everything back like it was, instead of leaving your back seat on the side of the road with your spare and wads of old Kleenex. They should put your house back together, fix your shattered door; they should cover your legal expenses, they should give you back your official innocence and clear your record. Even the guilty should not be punished beyond the actual harm done by their crimes. In a nation that believed in justice, the people would demand that the innocent not suffer, it would be their patriotic duty. In a police state, we shut our mouths. What are you going to do?