Actually found a box of faded, stained newspaper clippings from 1988-1993, best I can figure. Illuminating, reminding really, what I thought merited my attention.
Like a study reported 6/20/88 in USA Today about how Americans – throughout our lifetimes – spend five years waiting in lines, six months sitting at red lights and two years playing telephone tag with elusive callers.
Guess we solved that last one.
We spent, three decades ago, four years doing housework, three years attending meetings, eight months opening junk mail and one year searching for belongings amid the clutter of home or office.
“The whole point is for people to not waste time, but spend it doing what they want.” I’m sure that was the point as far as I’m concerned. Amuses how everything changes so fast, yet so much remains the same. You wouldn’t know unless you were old or a student of history or both.
Both is hard. The ironies are enough to give you whiplash.
The Wartime Spirit
By Tom Wicker Opinion for The New York Times October 3, 1989
The Bush-Bennett ”war on drugs” is not only underfinanced and misdirected toward predictably ineffective law enforcement rather than needed treatment. Like any other war, it’s sure to produce a dangerous wartime mentality that ”anything goes” in pursuit of victory.
No one argues that nothing needs to be done about drugs, particularly crack, the cheap cocaine derivative that creates virtually instant addicts. In a recent New York Times/CBS News Poll, the number of those who consider drugs the nation’s single worst problem had risen to 64 percent from 20 a year ago; and election researchers everywhere – as in the New York City mayoral election -are finding that drugs and crime form the issue most alarming to the voters.
No wonder – not when 875,000 people are estimated to be heavy users of illegal drugs in New York alone, when 17,500 crack babies were born to addicted mothers in Florida in 1987, when total cocaine business in the United States is reckoned at $150 billion annually, when drugs and the crime associated with this dirty trade are wrecking families and neighborhoods everywhere.
To cast needed counter-effort as a ”war,” however, and to slant it so heavily toward combat, arrests and jailing – the Bush-Bennett ”war” counts on the states to put up $5 to $10 billion for new prisons – could produce an ugly backlash. Even Mr. Bush won’t claim that his ”war” can have the kind of conclusive effect wars are supposed to have, or can redeem his overblown Inaugural pledge to end the ”scourge” of drugs.
An inevitable effect of wartime mentality, however, is the expectation that someday the war will end -in victory, of course. Mr. Bush, in fact, issued a ringing call for ”victory over drugs” in his televised declaration of ”war”; but he already knew, and Administration officials now concede, that nothing like such a victory can be achieved for decades to come, if ever, and that the actual Bush-Bennett goals are far more modest.
What will happen to public and Congressional attitudes if a supposed war – like the real one in Vietnam -drags on endlessly with marginal achievements and no apparent hope of victory? Some will give up, no doubt; but many, perhaps more, will call for escalation, new weapons, more troops, tougher tactics – victory at any price.
[I highlighted certain parts in a bright pink. – JDW]
The likely ineffectiveness of the Bush-Bennett ”war” will drive many worried Americans to such conclusions; already some dangerous attitudes are in evidence. A Washington Post/ABC News poll published the day after Mr. Bush’s speech found a shocking 62 percent of respondents willing even now to give up ”a few of the freedoms we have in this country” to support a ”war” on drugs. What will they be willing to sacrifice by, say, 1995?
Specifically, 52 percent said they would be willing to have homes searched, and 67 percent would allow cars to be stopped, by police without court orders, even if people like themselves were searched by mistake. Thus would these Americans surrender rights secured for 200 years by a Constitution they supposedly revere.
Perhaps even more dangerous, since the consequences are unpredictable, 82 percent favored allowing the military to combat illegal drugs within the U.S. Combat how? The Pentagon itself is opposed to any such variant of martial law, and so should be any American who cherishes the freedom we all extol.
A 55 percent majority supported mandatory drug testing – urine tests – for all Americans, about the most intrusive program Big Brother could undertake; 67 percent backed such tests for all high school students; and 83 percent favored reporting drug users, including relatives, not to treatment centers but to the police.
Other sacrifices of constitutional rights – easing the rules of evidence, preventive detention, Draconian sentencing – might easily be spawned in a wartime mentality. Identification cards already are being required in a Washington housing development beset by drug criminals. Drastic action to ”stop drugs” is advocated at all levels, not least by survivors in poor neighborhoods blasted by crack and crime.
So, as always in this country, the major threat to constitutional freedom is internal; and the force behind that threat is fear – once fear of subversion, now fear of drugs. If in this case fear is justified, the resulting wartime spirit is only the more dangerous. And those ”few freedoms” that might be lost will not easily, or ever, be regained.
Update. A MEASURE TO PROTECT financial institutions that service cannabis companies passed the House in a bipartisan vote recently, becoming the first standalone marijuana reform bill to ever clear a chamber of Congress.
Today, eleven states and the District of Columbia have legalized the recreational use of marijuana, and a majority of states also have legal medical marijuana programs.
So, as always in this country, the major threat to constitutional freedom is internal; and the force behind that threat is fear.
This time, fear of the other.
And again we are wrong.