I wish I could be in more than a couple of places at one time. I wish I could have been there to hang out with all ya'll, hear the speakers and help make it happen.
But I can't so I had to choose and I decided to go out into the woods, stalk the wild hypericum and late blackberries, roll the dog and kids in mud then dunk `em in the creek and bring `em home for grub while they're all still little enough to really enjoy that sort of thing.
Good doggone thing, too, cause my 19yo prodigal daughter jumped on a bus for home on Thursday morning, the 24th and got here around the time ya'll were probably settling into hotel rooms or friends spare rooms or bellying up to the bar.
In the past week, I've gotten to know this town through her and her dear old friend who moved back up here with his grandparents just before things went really crazy in Pompano. It's almost as crazy here; almost. And these are the onlyest reasons why I give a flyin' run at a rollin' donought about Straight, Inc., Miller Newton, PFG, DFAF their community coalitions and all the rest that they do with themselves these days.
Both here and in Pompano, this moralistic, puritanical, schizophrenic holy jihad--for which these programs serve as POW/indoctrination camps--have totally preverted the world in which my own daughters have got to learn to love and live and play. It is almost unimaginable when I think about it that the town that gave us Fred Rogers and Ron Paul can also play host to something like Operation Pipe Dreams and "elite" counterdrug taskforce training!
It is patently insane that these kids see a world where 30 year old snitches infiltrate their 14 year old brothers' crowds with just a little coke--about $3 worth at wholesale, more expensive than gold at retail--and completely worthless flattery.
It is just heartbreaking what these low-life bastards are doing
right now! I meet these kids and some of their lives suck. Sometimes they mess up and disapoint us; but then isn't that why we don't let them vote, drive or hold pulic office?
Whether they or I or anyone else has anything at all to say about it, these people are taking over the world. I'm precient enough to understand that, too soon, I'll be slow and weak and old and these kids will be in charge of the world. And they
shall change the world, for good or ill, through their action or inaction. So when I spot a spark of dignity in some of these kids, I want to nurture that so they'll be good to me and my grandkids when the time rolls around to return favors.
But the Semblers and their merry, scarry band of drug warriors? that's not what they see. They see an oportunity to get 14 year old kids hooked on coke, in debt and at odds with their own families just to try and perpetuate the myth that prohibition is going to start working any damned minute now!
In the process, they create oportunities for unimaginable wealth and power for people who posess qualities like cruelty, deceitfullness and more love for wealth and power than for their own families and friends.
Now, most of us are old enough and wise enough to understand that these kids would stand a much better chance if they pooled their weed, beer and cigarette money and invested in lotto tickets than to try and make anything but sorrow come out of angling on the black market. But these are young, impressionable children who are moving way too fast to see past the cars and the excitement and the drama. From their POV, it's romantic adventure.
We're the grown ups. We're supposed to know better. I can give the kids a free pass if I spot just a spark of dignity in them, and in most of them I do. But what the hell is wrong with thegrown ups? What's their excuse? We created this upside-down morality where a pimp personality gets the highest pay, betrayal of friends and family are deemed good and right putting a child in a cage to dicourage unauthorized euphoria has become the order of the day.
THAT is why I care about the program all these years later. I would have been happier and more care-free if I could have convinced myself that they were just a weird little cult of wackos and I'd escaped their influence when I hit the road at age 17. But the evidence to the contrary is overwhelming. These sadistic lunatics are messing up my kids world and I won't stand for it!
:flame:
BTW, Mo, I think we'd be an angry mob just about anywhere. Maybe we should all get Harleys or something? :em:
If we choose to violate the rights of the innocent in order to discover and act against the guilty, then we have transformed our country into a police state and abandoned one of the fundamental tenants of a free society. In order to win the war on drugs, we must not sacrifice the life of the Constitution in the battle.
--US District Judge H. Lee Sarokin
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Ginger Warbis ~ Antigen
American P.O.W. 10/80 - 10/82
Straight South (Sarasota, FL)
Anonymity Anonymous