Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed

And What We Can Do About It: A Judicial Indictment of the War on Drugs.

You all must read this book. Every responsible American voter should read it, no matter what their political orientation. It was written by a conservative judge who has the personal backing of judges across the nation. It is about how much harm we are doing to ourselves with the War on Drugs. He wants there to be conversation about the topic in the political world. I do too. If you read this book, I have helped in my own small way.

My Immigration Policy

Disclaimer: this is a rough draft of my ideas. I am open-minded about every single thing listed. The most important thing is to have dialog, which America is badly in need of. If someone has a better idea than me, and can convince me of that, I am willing to change my views. You should be too.

1) Let those who are here apply to become permanent residents but do not allow them to vote. If they had come here legally, they would have a say in our government. We cannot get rid of 11 million people. We must make them legal so that they can feed their children (who are American citizens) without fear of being arrested and sent away, and can do things like go to hospitals. But they do not deserve the vote.

2) Get rid of the law that makes anyone born on American soil an American. This does nothing but encourage illegal immigrants. Many of the European countries have abolished similar laws.

3) Reinforce the border. Invest in the long term. We need more agents on the border and we need more agents arresting illegals who do not apply for permanent residency.

4) End the catch-and-release program. If they are caught they must be thrown out like an unruly drunk from a bar. If Mexico has a problem with us throwing them back into Mexico, tell them to enforce their borders.

5) Fine the businesses that hire illegals into oblivion. Use the money to pay for border patrol.

6) Make it easier to become a citizen legally. Encourage people to come to America the right way. It is very difficult to become a citizen right now and this encourages illegal entry. We cannot let everyone who wants to come in, but those we do allow should not face so much red tape.

7) End the War on Drugs. Send the agents who are hunting drug lords out to combat illegals. A major (if not the only) reason illegals come to America is because their homelands (all of Central and South America) are torn by war and ruled by drug lords. The wars are about drugs. The drug lords have more money than the governments. The farmers plant illegal substances because they are poor and illegal things make more money than legal things. We can stop this. We can take the drug lords' money away. We can make it more profitable to grow coffee than anything else. We can give power back to the governments. How?

Take drug policy-making away from the federal government. "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." Remember that? The Tenth A-mend-ment? Each state should decide for itself how to handle drugs. What is right for Iowa is not right for New York. I, personally, believe that my state should experiment with government-regulated distribution. Sell marijuana, cocaine and heroin at a fraction of the cost on the street. The majority of every purchase will go to the state for drug treatment. With every purchase will be pamphlets on the dangers of drugs, clean needles, and information on how to receive help. Children will no longer be able to get drugs. We have been successful at keeping minors away from cigarettes and alcohol. Drug dealers do not card. We cannot control drug abuse if we are not in control of the drugs. When an addict buys heroin and uses in an unsafe way, it is between him, his dealer, and the dirty needle. We need to be part of the equation.

The benefit in terms of illegals: we will end many of the major problems in their countries because we will no longer be fighting the supply of drugs, we will be controlling the demand of drugs. I guarantee that every country south of us will benefit. NO MORE DRUG LORDS. And our own addicts will benefit. Did I mention that the prisons will empty? And that money can go to other things, border patrol among them? It's a win-win-win situation.

P.S. Having the state governments control drugs will mean that they are given both money and power that they do not currently have. We will return to being the country our forefathers believed we would be. States will be in control of their prisons, their police (who will be able to spend their time with violent criminals, not addicts) and we will be able to help addicts recover by making sure they are safe until they decide to seek help. THE TENTH AMENDMENT IS THE REASON I BELIEVE IN THIS COUNTRY. SAVING IT WILL SAVE BOTH AMERICAS.

In summary: If we bust businesses that support illegals, stop the flow into the country, adequately deal with the ones who are here, make it easier to come here the right way, abolish the born-here-citizen-here law, and end the War on Drugs so that there is less reason to come here to escape their countries in the first place, WE WILL NO LONGER HAVE ILLEGALS. We will have Americans. Like my ancestors who came here legally. America is a land of immigrants. LEGAL immigrants.

Why Ebola Is Not Going To Wipe Out Humanity

The following owes credit to a conversation with Professor Anderson, who said "There are certain ideas that are so preposterous that only a professor could come up with them" in response to a question about this topic.

Alright, so there's this guy, and he's a professor, and he has a huge following. And he thinks Ebola is going to kill us all. And he's psyched.

Did I mention he's from Texas?

I'm sorry. Inappropriate joke. I shouldn't make fun of any place just because. That's an ignorant thing to do. Even if it's Texas.

So...he never mentions the slow, painful liquefication of the organs. Or that blood comes spurting out of every hole in your body. No, he's chipper as can be. He can't wait to repopulate the world with the young co-eds who laugh at his jokes.

But the thing is, it's not possible. Every time Ebola pops up, it kills the people infected so fast that it wipes itself out. It happens every so often. Whatever animal carries it (I have my money on either bats or monkeys) spreads it to a few people. They spread it to a few more. And then they're all liquefied. The end. There is no way that it could spread fast enough to kill over 5 billion people. It's just not possible.

Genetically engineered smallpox. Now THAT could knock off a few billion.

If we're going to be afraid of things we can't control, let's at least be accurate.

Anthrocrapologists

"There are certain ideas that are so preposterous that only a professor could come up with them." --Professor Anderson, M.D., Harvard University

And now for my anthropology rant:

My professor said something at the start of class the other day that struck me as true: psychology doesn't take any theory seriously unless it is based on studies which count things. Psychology loves counting. It pretends to be a hard science this way.

Anthropologists, he said, don't try to force fake measurement. They observe and philosophize, as is natural in the social sciences.

Alright, I said. I'm partial to making fun of psychologists myself.

BUT then he began his lecture on attachment. He told the class that attachment to the mother is universal (I wrote a paper on this last semester and concluded that we need a lot more evidence before we can say such a thing). Then he said (essentially) that feminists are responsible for making mothers work 40 hours a week and children who are in daycare will be scarred for life. And that the mother should stay home with her children until they are at least 2. And that our society is going to hell because we all live in small families with very few strong bonds and no support. And that, basically, daycare is ruining America.

The woman sitting next to me and I spent the entire class challenging everything he said.

First of all, psychologists have completed prospective, follow-up studies a few years long of children in daycare. They found that in a high quality daycare (which poor people who work the most don't get, but that's another story), a child is no worse off. What is more important than daycare/staying home is the actual RELATIONSHIP the child has with its PARENT. My professor was basing his hypotheses on absolutely nothing but "gut instinct".

Second of all, a true feminist believes that a woman should do whatever she sees as best for herself and her family. Stay home? Work? Feminism is about CHOICE.

Third of all, fathers or grandparents who care for a child under 2 are just as good as a mother. The child does not need titties. The child needs love, affection, attention and consistency. AND children can benefit from strong relationships with daycare workers as well as mom and dad.

Finally, just because most of humanity lives in extended families and we live in nuclear families does NOT mean we are "worse off". In America, family is who we choose to be family. My aunts who were not technically my aunts helped raise me. My parents' friends were a lot like aunts and uncles. Teachers were mentors to me, I had a strong, consistent relatoinship with one particular daycare worker when I was small and I had an entire branch of family members at my CHURCH. My professor was acting as though the lack of extended family has left a void in American family life. HUMANITY DOES NOT ALLOW VOIDS. When family disappears our affect hunger means that we seek out others to fill the hole they left. If we do not stop needing relationships, we do not stop creating them when needed.

When Professor McSmartSmart started talking about whether or not women are "naturally" better prepared to be nurturing parents, I cleared my throat, raised my hand, and said, "Ultimately, why does it matter? If you admit that we can never be specific enough about human biology to base public policy on it, who cares?", he actually replied "It is an interesting question and it is interesting to try to answer interesting questions."

Yeah.

When he said it was unusual for a man to be involved in his child's birth and that studies showing sharp increases in oxytocin when a man sees his child born were probably only following upper-middle class men, I just tuned out. LALALALALALALALALA.

I learned something today. I learned that psychologists may often try to measure the unmeasurable, but anthropologists get to say whatever they want based on whatever limited and biased knowledge they claim to have.

Ritual

The meaning and the satisfactions of life derive from human interaction, for without others there is no self; without organization there is no society; without society humanity does not exist.

The institutionalization of sentiment in ritual form...reinforces the positive feelings essential to collaboration, [and] it allays the negative feelings that are potentially disruptive either to the community or to individual performance. It operates in the context of established meanings and understandings, and these taken together are what we often call religion, for everywhere emotions are thus "ritualized". The invention of ritual to structure human sentiment was crucial to the evolution of humanity...[T]he rapid evolution of culture and the world-wide spread of humanity did not take place until the Upper Paleolithic; that is, until ritual behavior is clearly evidenced as a part of the cultural repertoire. --Walter Goldschmidt, The Human Career; pp. 202-203

Ritual is the institutionalization of sentiment, even when it is only between two people. It is meant to change you. Once you go through a ritual, you will never be the same - no matter how small the change is. One cannot "undo" a ritual.

Friday, April 21st in 2006 I asked my girlfriend to marry me. This was something I had been ready to do for some time. I had obsessed over it, planned it, obliterated my plans, started planning again...in the end it was completely unplanned. I did it then and there because the feeling was right. I was standing there drenched in the sentiment I was looking to capture for our marriage. And by ritualizing it, I did capture it. I grabbed that moment and that feeling and froze it in time by asking her.

Something definitely changed when I asked her. We have been together a long time, but this ritual has moved us to the next plane of relation, interaction. And with the telling of our parents and the drinking of champagne we have begun to become a new social entity in our society, a "married couple", with all the societal expectations that go with it.

The self does not exist without the other. The other makes the self exist in its own mind. There is no such thing as marriage without ritual. The ritual makes the marriage exist as the social institution that it is. This would be true even if the people marrying were the only ones aware of the ritual. It only takes two people to have culture.

So, I suppose the lesson for the day is that sybolism is our shared reality. Or, no, maybe symbolism creates our shared reality. Hmmm...a semantic rubix cube...

Circumstance

"They sure as hell won't ever get fuckin' circumstance." -- Vietnam Vet to Aileen Wuornos in Monster.

If anyone understands circumstance it is Vietnam veterans and prostitutes. We all like to think that we would act honorably and make the "right" decisions under any circumstance. Of course we think this; our culture tells us that consistency of character is proof of character. That, and if we didn't believe that our narrative of self was stable - past, present and future - we would live in a world of chaos, anarchy, and failed human relationships.

But we forget that the "self" relies on society's rules and norms for its stability. Society tells us what is right, what is noble, what to be and what to do. When society deserts us - as in the case of the Vietnam veteran, left alone in a world of moral chaos and violence - stability of character crumbles.

I quote an anonymous veteran in Jonathan Shay's Achilles In Vietnam (which everyone should read):

Well, at first, I mean when i just come there, I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I couldn't believe Americans could do things like that to another human being...but then I became that. We went through villages and killed everything, I mean everything, and that was all right with me. (p.31)

Contrast this with another veteran's circumstance:

I was just lucky, that's all. There were never, never any civilians up where I was.... We did some horrible, horrible things to NVA--but they were soldiers.... Killing babies, young girls, I would have killed an American I seen raping a nine-year-old girl without giving it a moment's thought. But where we were in the A Shau, there just weren't any [civilians]. (p. 31)

Two soldiers, most likely from similar backgrounds and certainly from the same society, have completely different outlooks on violence in combat due entirely to their circumstance. Shay calls the "luck" referred to by the second veteran as "moral luck".

In Western culture we are taught that self-respect and the esteem of others is dependent on "firmness of character". Shay writes:

Many popular melodramas of moral courage provide satisfaction through the comforting fantasy that our own character would hold steady under the most extreme pressure of dreadful events. A permanent challenge of working with those injured by combat trauma is facing the painful awareness that in all likelihood one's own character would not have stood firm. Merely allowing ourselves to hear the combat veteran's story threatens our culturally defined sense of self-respect. We have powerful motives not to listen to the veteran's story, or to deny its truth. (pp. 31-32)

I could engage Shay's text endlessly, but I want to point to the meaning this has for psychology: Our brain was developed to adapt to circumstance, and our brain/body's interaction with circumstance is the reality of the nature/nurture debate. I object to the word "environment" after adolescence, because while it is an adequate term for the group of circumstances in which we are raised (and therefore come to define as "normal", no matter how fucked up), it is not an appropriate term for the situations and stresses that we face as adults. Veteran A was technically in the same "environment" as Veteran B. But the circumstances he faced were completely different.

Circumstance is not only "what is actually going on". It is our interpretation of it. We must process what is going on in terms of our life narrative and societal expectations. Well now, I suppose environment could be seen as one step further than circumstance...see my little diagram-wanna-be below. But either way, circumstance involves not just what happens to us, but how we fit that into our global (moral) understanding of life. The reason Vietnam was so horrible for the vets was that it obliterated their sense of the world. Thus the hyper-vulnerability to combat PTSD. When you're no longer tied to right and wrong (society) the only person you care about is yourself and maybe one combat buddy. Your social world shrinks with the reliability of the world around you. Which was true for the vets just before the "berserk" state. (Seriously, read the book.)

And while I'm on the topic, I must add that there IS no nature/nurture debate. It is ALWAYS both. You can argue how much is one vs. the other, but that's kind of like arguing whether a guy crashes his car because he's drunk or because the telephone pole was in front of him. Silly.

Gene activation/Protein production<-- --> Biology (structure of the brain) <-- --> Cognition <-- --> Circumstance <-- --> Environment (?)

Combat PTSD seems to (and I would bet it will be proven in the next five years) change the brain (hopefully semi-) permanently. Whether this is a chemical or structural change has yet to be seen. But either way: cognitive appraisal of the circumstance the environment has presented changes the biology of the person, which will inevitably affect the protein production, which affects which genes are dormant/active.

In other words, circumstance is integral not only to the "self" and the consistency of that self in terms of societal expectations, but also to the entire organism. We physically adapt to our world.

Psychology focuses far too much on what happens inside the body, acting as though the "environment" is objective. Cognitive psychology tries to fix this by worrying about how we "see" things. But it also plays into our culture's notion that the environment is there and someone of good character will interpret that environment properly. For example: depression is improper interpretation.

The bio-psychologists focus on depression IN the brain. Cog-psychologists focus on depression as a product OF the brain. As per usual, both are right and both are wrong...but neither is aware of culture's role in telling us what our character should make of the circumstance. What we should be is as important to us as what is. The anthropologists only focus on this cultural role in our world-view...but I'll save a rant on anthropology for another day.

So what have we learned today kids? We are lucky to be good people.

My First Post

I have finally done it. I have created a blog. But I am attempting to have a blog with a purpose...dubious as that may sound. I have been wanting to start writing for a while now about all of the many topics and themes running around in my head. I am taking four classes right now and so many things come up in all of them that I have to have somewhere to integrate my thoughts and ideas.

I am a student of humanity. There is no better way to put it. Psychology, Sociology, Anthropology, Ethnomusicology, History, Philosophy...all of these apply, but none is adequate to quench my thirst for some bit of understanding. None of these schools has "nailed it". Many times they contradict eachother. This blog is where I want to try to make sense of it all. To find out what I think.

I have always had a sneaking suspicion that We are the Answer to our own Question. I will spend my life trying to find out. I will never find out. Reality is a Paradox.