Some American Responses to the Charlie Hebdo Massacre

“I am Charlie Hebdo.”

“I am not Charlie Hebdo.”

“It’s Obama’s fault, he’s a wimp.”

“Sure it was horrendous, but what about (innumerable other examples of terror or censorship)?

“Well, if those people would just not be quite so offensive…”

“Islam is a violent religion, unlike Christianity. Christian terrorists aren’t really Christians.”

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Such a range of American responses to this week’s violence in Paris, from Fox News to far left. The range reflects how polarized we are as a nation about religion, violence, speech and humor.

A few examples:

1) Fox News: Another Benghazi - Obama is a liar - It’s all about us – We’re next.

The reports on Fox “News” were, as usual, less on what actually happened and more about blaming Obama, both for lax security and lying. It was like the way they have flailed the Benghazi story; why won’t the President tell the truth about what really happened (well actually, in both cases, he did), why can’t he use the word terrorism to describe the events (well actually, he did.) And why is he such a wimp? Fox’s Gretchen Carlson fanned the flames with “Keep in mind this administration is more concerned about executive actions for manufacturing and even climate control today, and releasing Gitmo detainees. We now know many of those detainees go back to join the jihad. So at this crucial moment, after a horrific attack on one of our allies, will politics continue to trump reality?...Will the United States once again be next hit (by terrorism)?”

2) Nice White Well Meaning Moderates: can’t you just tone it down a bit?

David Brooks, a smart but often smarmy right/moderate regular columnist for the New York Times titled his column, “I am Not Charlie Hebdo.” While condemning the attacks and affirming the value of free expression, he indulged in his frequent style of condescension:

"In most societies, there’s the adults’ table and there’s the kids’ table. The people who read Le Monde or the establishment organs are at the adults’ table. The jesters, the holy fools and people like Ann Coulter and Bill Maher are at the kids’ table. They’re not granted complete respectability, but they are heard because in their unguided missile manner, they sometimes say necessary things that no one else is saying.

Healthy societies, in other words, don’t suppress speech, but they do grant different standing to different sorts of people. Wise and considerate scholars are heard with high respect. Satirists are heard with bemused semirespect. Racists and anti-Semites are heard through a filter of opprobrium and disrespect. People who want to be heard attentively have to earn it through their conduct."

This reminds me of what a lot of well meaning but stupid white people are saying about our epidemic of police violence against unarmed black young men: “Well, if those black young men would just behave better, not be in suspect places, go home at night, pull their pants up, be nicer….” Kids’ table indeed.

3) Islamophobia and Religious Double Standard

Many right wing commentators almost gloated and relished what they saw as more proof of Islam’s “essential” violence. Trying to counter that lie, some scholars of religion and left wing appreciators of the great diversity within Islamic cultures reposted the results of a study done a couple years ago about American’s attitudes toward Christians and Moslems who commit violence, and our sorry double standard. 

In the study, more than 8-in-10 (83 percent) Americans said that self-proclaimed Christians who commit acts of violence in the name of Christianity are not really Christians. In contrast, less than half (48 percent) of Americans say that self-proclaimed Muslims who commit acts of violence in the name of Islam are not really Muslims. The study’s director noted that those who self-identify as white evangelical Protestants have the largest double standard:

"Among white evangelical Protestants, the gap is a staggering 47 percentage points: only 10 percent of evangelicals believe that a self-identified Christian perpetrators are really Christian, compared to 57 percent who believe that self-identified Muslim perpetrators are truly Muslim."

That statistic was born out this past week in the conservative Christian media.

4) Yes, horrible. But what about……?

Many leftish commentators mourned and condemned, but then they did the comparison exercise; why so much heat and outrage in this instance and not in others? For example, Michael Lerner, editor of the progressive Jewish Tikkun Magazine wrote:

"Why wasn’t the media] this interested in a bomb that went off outside the NAACP’s Colorado Springs headquarters the same day as they were highlighting the attack in Paris? Colorado Springs is home to some of the most extreme right-wing activists. It was a balding white man who was seen setting the bomb, some reports claim, and so the media described it as an act of a troubled “lone individual,” rather than as a white right wing Christian fundamentalist terrorist.

Few Americans have even heard of this incident.

Paris, January 11, 2015And when the horrific assassinations of 12 media people and the wounding of another 12 media workers resulted in justifiable outrage around the world, did you ever wonder why there wasn’t an equal outrage at the tens of thousands of innocent civilians killed by the American intervention in Iraq or the over a million civilians killed by the U.S. in Vietnam, or why President Obama refused to bring to justice the CIA torturers of mostly Muslim prisoners, thereby de facto giving future torturers the message that they need not even be sorry for their deeds (indeed, former Vice President Cheney boldly asserted he would order that kind of torture again without thinking twice)?"

5) Me, still in shock.

As for myself, I am still in shock, appalled, sad. A confirmed Francophile, I confess I probably am more outraged by this violence than the daily violence my own country inflicts world wide. How’s that for denial?

When I heard the news of the massacre, I happened to be reading a novel about Paris. I’m on a Hillary Mantel kick and am in the middle of her historical novel about the French Revolution, A Place of Greater Safety. I already had my Paris maps out to see where the Cordelier district was and where Danton and Robespierre lived. I only had to move my eye a bit from the 6th to 11th arrondissements to find the Charlie Hebdo headquarters. The plots have similar features. Parisians killing each other. Blood in the streets. People talking about being martyrs for a cause. Debates about free speech. The role newspapers play in democracy. Is this a revolution? Will Paris ever again be a place of safety?

Later that day I went to the Monterey Aquarium, where I volunteer every Thursday. I wear a badge that reads “Je parle Francais.” I was standing in the aviary and heard a woman speaking French. In halting French I said, “Je suis tres desolee pour votre tragedie. C’est incroyable et tragique. Aujourd’hui nous sommes Charlie.” I think she understood me; with tears in her eyes she said, “Merci.”

Copyright © 2015 Deborah Streeter

We’re a Little Lost Here in America

“Kathy I’m lost, I said, though I knew she was sleeping. I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why. Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike, they’ve all come to look for America.”

I try, in this column, to look for America. I’ve been writing about that search here for almost three years now. Not sure what we’ve found, but the search is challenging and rewarding, for me at least.

But like songwriter Paul Simon, I often feel empty and aching about my native land. Probably lost, too, not sure why. Of equal concern to me is that my nation feels lost. Where are we going, and do we know how to get there?

In these columns I use lots of travel images and metaphors; I have written about road trips and great rivers, about marchers and mountain climbers. Maybe I’m trying to convince myself that “we the people,” a pilgrim people (meaning we will always be on the road) actually have a plan, a map. Like the Constitution, that’s a good guidebook for a people on a journey. Our destination shouldn’t really be that hard to find: I suggest we plan to stop at “ liberty and justice for all.”

But lately we feel more like a traffic jam, or a car crash pileup with fist fights over who’s to blame. Reading all the end of the year reflections and summations, and predictions for the new year, gets me thinking this way. How many roads must we walk down, before we are called a nation? The answer may only be, that it’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

Charlie PierceSo as I ease back after a couple weeks off, allow me to reprint selections from the fine and wise end of the year column by a writer and social critic I admire, Charlie Pierce. He writes a regular political blog for Esquire Magazine, is a sports and culture contributor to Grantland , and is a regular panelist on the very funny National Public Radio news quiz show, “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me.” 

This is from his political blog, somewhat edited.

He begins by reminding us of how much has changed in the past 10 years. Think about what it was like in 2005:

A decade ago, we were all preparing to endure the second round of the Avignon Presidency*, which we, as a nation, unaccountably had re-installed in Washington -- or that we, as a nation, at the very least, had voted for in sufficient numbers to keep the result of the election within the Margin Of Finagle in places like Ohio. Hurricane Katrina was still in our future…. Very large investment banks were writing mortgages with their eyes closed, monetizing those mortgages into securities, selling those securities to various suckers, and betting on the failure of those securities among themselves. A lot of people were getting very rich planting land mines throughout the world economy. All of that was going on as we prepared, in our infinite wisdom, a mere decade ago, to inaugurate George W. Bush for a second term as the most powerful man in the world.

(*Avignon Presidency: That’s Pierce’s slang for the eight years of the George W. Bush presidency. He says, “The "Avignon" refers to a period of the Middle Ages in which the people were seized by a sense of dread and fatalism when confronted with the incompetency and flagrant wastefulness and corruption of the ruling party in the Catholic Church.”)

Now I will skip to the end of Pierce’s column. I’ve reformatted it into separate sentences. It almost sounds to me like a confession or prayer:

We are a little lost here in America.

Too many of us have tuned out, and too many of us are deeply tuned in to the wrong things.

Our eccentricities have curdled into crochets.

Our love for the strange and deeply weird has soured into a devotion to the mean and deeply angry.

Our renegade national soul has given itself up to petty outlawry.

We have tailored the principles of our founding documents -- flawed though their authors were -- into cheap camouflage for our boring traditional grudges.

(That’s Pierce’s lament. He ends with a little hope, but he’s basically a pretty cynical/realistic guy, so it’s just a hint of hope):

None of these things are good things. But none of those things is permanent, either. Imagination always has been the way out -- a faith in that which seems impossible, a trust that not every mystery is a murder mystery, and that not every mysterious creature is a monster. Imagination is the way out -- a belief that safety is not necessarily the primary (or even the secondary) goal of democratic citizenship, and that a self-governing political commonwealth does not always come with a lifetime guarantee. Yes, we are a little lost here in America, but we can find our way, and the best way that we can find is the one that seems like the least secure, the darkest trail, the one with the long, sweeping bend in the road that leads god knows where. We must trust what we can imagine, and we must trust that what we can imagine is the product of what is the best of us. And, whether we imagine it or not, it's going to happen anyway.

Or, as that great sage Joaquin Andujar once put it, "My favorite word in English is, 'Youneverknow.'"

Happy Fcking New Year, to all of us magnificent bastids.

To which I’ll add in my New Year’s greetings: May we keep imagining, and may we find our way.

Copyright © 2015 Deborah Streeter

Just Say Know: When Should Kids be Allowed to Drink and Drug?

Here at Blowin’ in the Wind, we’re spending December looking at American behavior and attitudes toward drinking and drugging.  First we looked at Prohibition, and then last week, the very American history of Alcoholics Anonymous.  Today, our attitudes and actions on teenage drinking and drugging, and some comparisons to other countries. 

If you want to drink legally in America, you have to be 21 years old.  Same age for folks who want to smoke marijuana in the three states who have legalized pot.

How many other nations have a legal drinking age of 21, besides the US?   Only three: Palau, Indonesia, and Mongolia.  Every other country in the world allows either 16 or 18 year olds to drink alcohol.  (And presumably smoking pot, where legal.)

I did not know this.  I knew the drinking age was younger than 21 in the UK and France – is there even a drinking age at all in France?  Probably also Germany.  (Turns out 14 year old Germans can drink in public with their parents, and in the UK parents can give their kids drinks at home as long as they are over five. No ale for you, little four year old.)

But I guess I thought America had decided on age 21 because all our great American scientists and educators and legal experts had settled on that age as the best balance of adolescent development (surely we want our kids to be healthy) with personal freedoms (we do have a sort of frontier pattern of allowing all kinds of crazy behavior) and public safety (we’re pretty good on auto safety laws and say we want to reduce auto accidents.)

But every other nation is 18 or younger?  Are they just reckless sots and bad parents?

And how’s that age 21 legal age working out for us?  Are our young people happy to stay sober so their adolescent brains can develop drug free?  Are they staying out of trouble so much that our law enforcement agencies are freed up to put resources into other illegal activities?  Are we wiser and more obedient than other nations? 

Or we still hanging on to some of our moralizing and misguided attitudes from Prohibition? 

An interesting group of Americans has recently come out in favor of lowering the drinking age.  No, it’s not college students.  It’s college presidents.  135 of them signed a statement supporting a nationwide conversation about young adult drinking and a reconsideration of the drinking age.  Why?  Because of the epidemic of binge drinking.  Half of all US college students who drink report that they engaged in binge drinking in the previous two weeks.  Campus binge drinking is a major factor in another campus epidemic: sexual assaults.  These university presidents point out that in European countries teenage drinkers tend to be introduced to alcohol by their parents and that only one in ten drinking episodes results in inebriation.  In the US, on the other hand, young people learn to drink away from home and in half of every drinking session the young drinkers get loaded. 

The organizer of this effort is a former Middlebury College history professor.  He knows his US history: Prohibition, he reminds his colleagues, had more unintended negative consequences than success.  Folks actually drank more and faster when it was prohibited.  That’s what binge drinking is now.  Crime and illegal supplying of booze skyrocketed in the 20’s and today there is still a huge subculture of illegal and criminal supplying to minors.  He points out that drunk automobile accidents started going down in the 60’s, when the drinking age was 18, and has stayed down, despite the change in drinking age in the 1980’s, and can be credited to air bags, seat belt laws, lower blood alcohol level and designated drivers.  Not to this new Prohibition.

Oh, and speaking of blood alcohol levels, a rough survey of the laws for that in different countries suggests that most places bust you for fewer drinks than in the US, even for commercial drivers (most places it’s zero for truck drivers etc, but in the US it’s .04, half of what regular drivers can get busted for.)

So other countries seem to do a better job setting up a learning process with their kids and being more realistic about what kids are up to.  And holding them, and commercial drivers, more accountable when they do drink.  (Or am I just indulging in grass is greener, anything is better than US envy?  Easy to do.)

As I’ve said it the two previous columns, we’re so ambivalent in the US about having fun in general – we are puritans and libertines at the same time.  And we seem to give our kids that very mixed message with a dollop of denial. When it comes to drinking, and sex for that matter, we say, “It’s fun, great, our basic hoped for activity at the end of every day.  So don’t do it.”  Especially as we relate to our kids.  Our default approach to difficult issues seems to be Nancy Regan’s favorite: Just say no.  Like having your only sex ed curriculum be abstinence.  It just doesn’t work.  Instead of parents discussing with their kids how to make decisions on important issues like drinking or sex, we just say, don’t do it!  Til you’re out of the house. 

As part of the newly legalized marijuana in Colorado the state health department is trying to convince teenagers to obey the law (age 21) by citing studies that heavy dope smoking in young teenagers affects IQ and increases risk of schizophrenia.  One of their campaign slogans is “Just Say Know.”  (More on legaliztion of marijuana next week.)

I like to think that knowledge is better than denial, that “know” is a better approach to education than “no.”   But, then, I’m an American, ambivalent and in denial.

Copyright © 2014 Deborah Streeter

“Every Man Needs to Acquire Habits of Self-Help”

Week Two of our series on Americans and liquor, our actions and attitudes. 

When we left off last week our President has just marked the end of Prohibition, 1933, by saying our nation needed “a good strong drink.”  For once, we obeyed our President, and hit the bottle.  Women in particular joined in the fun; having been barred from saloons before Prohibition, they had discovered the delights of drinking with other men and women in speakeasies.  Among Prohibition’s many unintended consequences, as we said last week, was a sharp rise in the volume of liquor and the number Americans putting it away each year.

Bill WilsonBy 1935, only two years later, two serious drunks, Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith founded Alcoholics Anonymous, “to help other alcoholics achieve sobriety.” (It should be noted that AA does not take a stand on temperance or any other outside issues; it only focuses on helping alcoholics achieve sobriety.  It is not anti alcohol, just pro recovery for those powerless over alcohol.) 

Today AA claims US membership of over a million, worldwide 2 million members in 100,000 groups, and has spawned countless other programs using the 12 step approach.  Filmmaker Ken Burns called us “A Nation of Drunkards,” (not as high per capita consumption as, say, Russia, or the UK, but up there.)  But our nation also leads the pack in recovery movements.  As we said last week, we Americans are committed to both self-indulgence and self-improvement, often simultaneously, or at least serially!

The self-help movement, that very American approach to solving one’s problems by forming support groups of people similarly afflicted, was really perfected by AA.  But you can go back farther and find advocates for self improvement like Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, and even to Ben Franklin’s quaint and crazy self actualizing schemes.  And my title quote is from that most unlikely hero of the self-help movement, Ralph Waldo Emerson. 

It’s hard to picture Emerson at an AA meeting; he was such an advocate for self-reliance and individualism, working out one’s own problems, in one’s own way.  But in fact, self reliance supports the egalitarian spirit of self help groups like AA, and fosters its style of suspicion toward experts or authorities.  Such groups are remarkably democratic and lay led, with local autonomy and low overhead. Keep it simple and local, use volunteers; sounds pretty American to me.

Dr. Bob SmithI won’t recount the whole 75 years of AA or quote a lot of statistics – the facts and data are all pretty easily found. But since this is a column about America, let me reflect on a few people in AA history who embody some very typical American styles and attitudes.

Bill Wilson, co-founder, was a failed Wall Street broker who kept drinking away his jobs, relationships, trust, and self esteem.  He finally got sober in NY with the help of an unorthodox doctor who thought alcoholism was a disease, not a moral failing, a Christian group, the Oxford Movement, and by reading in the new field of psychology, especially William James. With the zeal of a convert he used his salesman skills at first just to help one alcoholic at a time, but for the next four decades he applied his sales experience and organization ideas into forming a movement.  There have been movies and plays about Bill and cofounder Dr. Bob; while Bill is of course a historical person, he seems in real life to be almost like a character in a drama, as American a salesman as Willie Loman is Death of a Salesman. 

Bill met Dr. Bob in Akron Ohio in 1935.  (Last week I noted that both the Temperance Movement and AA started in Ohio – more Americana, heartland Midwest.)  Newly sober but tempted to drink while away from his NY home on a sales trip, Bill phoned an unknown clergyman from the hotel lobby asking for the name of another drunk to talk with, and was referred to a notorious drunk who was also a local doctor.  They met at the home of a well to do woman, Henrietta Sieberling, a member of the Oxford Movement.  They talked all night, helped each other stay sober, and AA was born.

Dr. Bob’s part of the AA story adds more Americana to the tale, at least the mid 20^th century brand.   For all its anti-professionalism and determination to be lay led, AA would never have lasted without considerable help from professionals, like clergy and physicians, who would refer clients to their groups and lend credibility to the new idea that alcoholism was not a moral failure of the lower classes but a disease that affects every class and race (and gender and occupation.)  And despite AA’s remarkable and crucial insistence that it be self supporting by members and decline outside contributions, the progrm needed and got all kinds of advocacy and support from non-alcoholic people of power and influence and money. Mrs. Sieberling and countless other women hosts and patrons, provided support besides money – coffee, encouragement, referrals, credibility.  Lois Wilson, Bill’s wife, founded Al-Anon for the spouses and families.  The Rockefellers and other industry leaders, as they had supported temperance 30 years earlier to improve worker efficiency, now advocated for companies to treat rather than fire workers in recovery.

Marty MannOne more less known AA figure who adds to the Americana is Marty Mann, one of the first women members of AA and one of the first to carve out a profession in the field of recovery education and advocacy.  Founder in 1944 of the National Council on Alcoholism, she took the message of recovery to academia, legislatures, public media, and popular culture.  Born into wealth in Chicago at the turn of the century she drank heavily into the 30’s, when she met Bill Wilson, and became his first woman sponsee.  Like Bill and Bob, she brought her vocational skills, in her case, media and public relations, into her convert’s zeal.  She was fearless and bold in proclaiming her three convictions, which were all radical ideas in the 40’s:

-Alcoholism is a disease and the alcoholic a sick person.

-The alcoholic can be helped and is worth helping.

-Alcoholism is a public health problem and therefore a public responsibility.

Mann worked tirelessly with state and federal representatives and agencies to enact laws that set aside public health money, medical insurance and public institutions for alcohol treatment (as opposed to the then norm of jail and drunk tanks.)  Through savvy public media, she created a climate and hosted events where many famous public figures came out about their alcoholism.  She helped to found Yale University’s School of Alcohol Studies and brought academic credibility to the progressive view of alcoholism as a public health problem.  In the late 50’s Edward R. Murrow included her in his list of the 10 greatest living Americans.

Alcoholics Anonymous is now active in 170 countries, but its birthplace and its heartland values are as American as – apple pie?  How about hard apple cider?

Copyright © 2104 Deborah Streeter

“What American Needs is a Good Strong Drink”

That’s what President Franklin Roosevelt said 81 years ago this week, Dec. 5, 1933, on the day Prohibition was repealed and Americans could drink again legally.  After a 13-year failed attempt at improving America’s moral character by outlawing booze, the nation returned to drinking, and per capita alcohol consumption has risen every year since.

I’m going to write my next three or four columns on Americans and alcohol, and maybe drugs too.  So many very American themes:

- how we are a nation both puritanical and decadent,

- how our very varied religious landscape tries to effect a national morality, but often makes things worse, and how very much American Protestantism has changed (hint: there are no Protestants on the Supreme Court.)

- how we keep trying to improving ourselves and others, from social reform to self help, with mixed results and unintended consequences.

- the interesting role of women in the temperance movement, the place of temperance in the first wave of the women’s movement, and the role of women in the burgeoning self help movements like AA and NA, all the way up to Oprah,

- the weird and scary interplay of organized crime, smuggling, violence, drug wars, police corruption, a hundred years ago, and today,

- the weird and scary interplay of drugs and alcohol and our economy; we make so much policy based on drug and alcohol money, licit and illicit.

- Bonus question: Why did so many anti-alcohol movements start in Ohio?

I took a class once in seminary about bread as a mirror or lens on all of society – its history, variety, symbolism, economics, labor, nutrition, etc.   One could use booze as a similar mirror or lens on America.  Put another way, let’s look at America the way author David James Duncan looked at his own life in his great book, My Story as Told By Water.  

So for the next few weeks I’ll offer some thoughts and themes on “Our America as Told by Alcohol.”

So for today, a little about Prohibition and how familiar it sounds today.

Filmmaker Ken Burns did a good series on Prohibition, which aired on public TV last year.  (One could also use Ken Burns films as an American mirror or lens: Civil War, baseball, jazz, the miscarriage of justice in the Central Park Rapist case, the Roosevelts, and now Prohibition.)

He called the three episodes: A Nation of Drunkards, a Nation of Scofflaws, a Nation of Hypocrites.  That pretty much sums it up: we’ve always drunk a lot, we ignore laws intended to improve society (civil rights, the speed limit) and we say one thing and do another.

The temperance movement began as early as the 1840’s, one of many 19^th century social reform movements. Women were getting organized and advocating publicly for a variety of social issues – child labor laws, the vote, property rights, education.  And temperance, in an effort to reduce domestic violence (a nice way of saying “drunken attacks”) against women and children.  At the same time, the growing industrial complex supported temperance as a way to improve workplace efficiency.  Not only abused women but also robber barons like Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie wanted the guys out of the saloons and back to work.

The century’s reform efforts came in waves, with women’s rights having to, or choosing to, take a back seat to abolition, in the first half of the century.  Then the temperance movement stalled because revenue taxes from alcohol sales were required to finance the Civil War. But Evangelical Protestants kept at it, preaching that the nation needed to improve its morality.  The Women’s Christian Temperance Union, founded in 1874, in Oberlin, Ohio, gave women a less threatening issue to organize around than suffrage, but women went public and radical pretty fast; they did their own version of Occupy protests at saloons and whisky distilleries. 

It was actually another group, the Anti Saloon League, that eventually became the more effective temperance lobbying organization; it virtually invented pressure politics and single issue lobbying.  Like today’s gun lobby, ASL and WCTU were able to intimidate and shame legislators, who hurriedly voted for a constitutional amendment in 1920 that outlawed the manufacture, sale and transport of alcohol.  And just as hurriedly voted to repeal 13 years later.

One commentator writes, “It is no mistake that President Hoover’s 1928 description of Prohibition as “a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose” entered the poplar lexicon as “the noble experiment.”  It was unfortunate for the entire nation that the experiment failed as miserably as it did….The ultimate lesson is two-fold.  Watch out for solutions that end up worse than the problems they set out to solve, and remember that the Constitution is no place for experiments.”

So many of these issues linger today, like a bad hangover.  What did we learn from this failed experiment?  Sadly I am as conflicted as the next person about any lessons learned.

-Should we solve problems by amending the Constitution?  I don’t think so, when it comes to issues like a Constitutional amendment defining life as beginning at conception, or naming English as the official US language.  But I do like the idea of amending the Constitution to overturn Citizens United; let’s say only people are people, not corporations. 

-In general I am suspicious of people who practice single-issue politics, be it temperance or gun rights or Benghazi.  Life is more complicated than that.  But I would never ever  vote for someone who didn’t support abortion rights, even if they were good on everything else.

-Protestants – don’t be so high and mighty about your morality.  It’s easy to make fun of the Protestant temperance clergy who condemned sacramental wine, tried to write wine out of the Bible, and made racist slurs about Irish and Italian immigrants.  But I hear echoes of that today in conservative evangelical slurs about large Hispanic families and teenage mothers.  But what about little Protestant me - I disapprove of San Francisco’s Catholic Cardinal taking Mormon money to oppose gay marriage.  Keep your religion out of the bedroom.

-Attorney General Eric Holder has been trying to make it so blacks and whites aren’t sentenced so disparately for drug offenses, but I still hear white conservatives assuming all drug dealers and users are black or Hispanic, as the prohibitionists assumed about immigrants.  It’s the white suburban kids buying the drugs that go free, and go to work on Wall Street. But even in the so-called “War on Drugs” (like the “War on Cancer,” bad metaphor), a simplistic prohibition attitude (just say no) ignores the deep complexity of issues around addiction and treatment and economics.

-Prohibition actually made people drink more, rather than less.  Just saying no, any parent can tell you, makes the product or behavior more appealing.  People in the 1920’s drank more, and drank illicitly and dangerously.  Women especially started drinking a lot more because they were allowed into speak-easies as they hadn’t been into saloons.  We see that pattern in binge drinking today, especially in college.  Like sex – abstinence teaching does not work.   Teach responsible drinking.

-Don’t pass laws and then fail to enforce them or enforce them fairly.  A generation of Americans broke the law in speak-easies or their own bathtub breweries.  That scofflaw and hypocritical attitude of Americans toward the law hasn’t gone away.   Likewise our suspicion about the sincerity and truthfulness of the police has only gotten worse, and it’s not all their fault.

-Figure out a better way to pay for government than so-called “sin taxes.”  Government  hurriedly passed Prohibition but didn’t realize that in some states, like New York, 75% of revenue came from liquor taxes.  The federal government lost $11 billion in tax revenue during the 1920’s and had no money to enforce the laws.  Today we continue to fund a lot of programs with these “sin taxes” on cigarettes and booze.  Our citizen taxpayer rate actually has gone down for the past few decades, we are less willing to pay our fair share.  What does that teach about citizenship?

Ok, enough rant about our sad nation and its sadder government.  Don’t read this and drown your sorrows in drink!  Pick a designated driver and get home safe.  Cheers!

Copyright © 2014 Deborah Streeter