I'll cop to that. I'm sorry if I hurt you. I'd been living this role all my life up to that point.
If you want to talk about complicity and retribution, where do we draw the line? Every teacher and school faculty member who didn't do anything to protect us? All the law enforcement people who maintained the perimeter in our little prison without walls? All the pop shrinks and all the talk show hosts and all the audience members who do their part to re-enforce the doctrine?
A lot of people have taken umberage at my comparing forced treatment to Stalinist reeducation, the Program and DARE to Nazi Hitler Jugend, area drug taskforces to storm troopers and those 1-800-BEA-SNITch anonymous tip hotlines, Citizens On Patrol and police organized neighborhood watch programs to the Nazi Stazi.
But no one, so far, has shown me any real serious flaw in the comparison. Even the prima facia evidence that there has been no mass execution of drug war prisoners is starting to fall apart as we see more and more often headlines about malnutrition, food poisoning and forced labour in our prison system where roughly half of the inmates are drug war POWs.
If it's accurate to say that the core of the Program is totalism philosophy, then the Program is so deeply entrenched in our society that it's a part of who we are. Like the German people since WWII, we're going to have to come to terms with this ugly reality and find ways to forgive eachother or go on hating.
As a society, we are almost all complicit in this nightmare. We're all in it together. We're not going to punish our way out of this.
"If only there were evil people somewhere, insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"--Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago
Are staff members forgivable? Infinitely so! Staff was just another phase of the Program. There are far worse crimes committed every day in this war. At least you don't have to live with having shot an unarmed kid like some of our law enforcement officers do or having sent a hundred young kids to prison for decades like a lot of our judges and prosecutors do. I wonder how
they sleep at night!
for it is a truth, which the experience of all ages has attested, that the people are commonly most in danger when the means of insuring their rights are in the possession of those of whom they entertain the least suspicion.
--Alexander Hamilton
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Ginger Warbis ~ Antigen
American drug war P.O.W.
10/80 - 10/82
Straight South (Sarasota, FL)
Anonymity Anonymous