Fully agreed! Targeting the problems is kinda different, though. Sure - if ‘we’ didn’t make laws that prop up the rich. ‘We’ only elect guys who do that in our names, though - based on what are often smear campaigns, and even if not, campaigns run by marketing people. And, reporters hang about waiting for the While House or some congressional office to tell us all whatever it wants us to think - certainly not your house or my house!
We had hoped that the wide-open abilities of the internet would change things - and it has, in some ways. I can reach thousands on the internet in less time than I could contact a dozen of my own neighbors. Or like this story. It just can’t change the system it tells us about very well.
Believe it or not, there was a time when newspapers actually reported everything Congress did in the past week! All of it. Not press releases - the actual minutes. And then, people would head down to the taverns and it would be all the buzz - and fisticuffs over politics were a completely expected norm. (Not that the fist fights were a great way to handle it - but that people could be that involved and passionate about it all.) They took it very, very personally. That hasn’t happened within living memory. No hundreds of pages for one stupid act, no dozens of tv breaks to tell you what it all means - just the weekly news itself.
So - who do we blame? The marketing people? The press as a whole? Growth? Progress? There’s an active movement now to deny opiates to anyone who hasn’t got cancer- most fueled by families of addicts who died. No need to think they’re gonna hop on board with legalizing anything! They don’t even understand that the addicts did it themselves - not pharma, not doctors. (I know - grief and loss, but still.) If they’re so wrapped up in thinking ‘drugs’ are evil as they’ve been told for so long, how on earth can we expect them to think about ow business would change if they were legal? (And I do agree, they should be legalized.)
Man. The hard part is just figuring out how in the world to get there from here. Even CO and WA haven’t one that far…yet.
