sometimes you gotta take a stand:
as a follow-up to my criminal justice class’ guided tour through christiania, today we conducted a civilized debate about drugs. teacher jeanne split us into two, assigning each half the position of defending either the legalization of hard and/or soft drugs, or keeping the laws the way they are. i remember my father driving me somewhere in new mexico once, i couldn’t have been more than ten, while he lectured me at length on why drugs should be legalized. i’d never thought about it before and at first i found it astonishing that my father the attorney, who made a point of encouraging me to put money in meters even when there is no chance of getting caught, should advocate decriminalizing what nancy reagan on tv had drilled into my head was so wrong.
the more i listened, the more i agreed. that was the pattern of my childhood: my father, often my brother, and sometimes my brother’s friend josh who sat with us in the back of the bus, could convince me of nearly anything. but the lecture came back to me as we listed reasons to legalize drugs. consider the potential tax revenue as well as the money the government would save not having to enforce drug laws or maintain the disproportionately-black one-third of prison population. consider that those who out of boredom or frustration seek escape will always find a way. consider that the world sanctions substances equally addictive, dehabilitating, and/or lethal. i advocated legalizing it all, to which people laughed and looked at me curiously. i shrugged: let them find another way to break the law.
moving right along: in my next class, we watched night and fog, the 1955 french documentary about the holocaust with a focus not on nazis vs. jews but human beings in all their various roles. even having seen it all before, i was brushing away tears like flies. after relevantly briefing us on other genocides — slavery in america, rwanda, cambodia, stalin’s russia, turkey-armenia, WWII japan in china — teacher margaret urged us into a discussion of the comparability or uniqueness of the holocaust. the class generally agreed that there’s no point trying to give more credence to one monstrosity or another.
i mentioned something that had come up on sarah k.’s site, the question of whether “a war criminal is a war criminal,” and the prevalence of nazi jargon in popular protests. in my opinion, it’s a sloppy, weak use of a lanuage, just as much as a cliche is. it elicits a knee-jerk reaction but over time that will diminish until people are as numb to it as they are to everything else.
for the rest of today, i will sit peacefully, watch the godfather at dfi, and agree with everything anyone says.