O'Reilly on Drugs

I was listening to Bill O'Reilly on the radio this morning. While talking about a particular drug dealer who got a very long (mandated) prison sentence, he was going off on callers who disagree with the "War on Drugs," referred to by the honest as the War on the Bill of Rights.

The only justification he offered for his utterly unreasoned stance was "for the children."

Sorry. Even when my kids were young, I thought that making the world child-safe was a ridiculous idea, both because it can't be done and because the world would then suck for adults. Sorry kids, there are more of us than you. Not only that, but soon you kids'll be grown up and you'll be hating life in the nerf-world, too.

Parents, you have to keep your kids away from drugs. Your kids aren't my problem. To repeat, you keep your kids away from drugs.

You say you can't watch your kids all the time? Well, you're right. Fortunately, you don't have to. What you have to do is be with the kids a lot (read just about all the time) in their first four or five years. Read to them, teach them, stimulate them to learn. As they grow and learn, they become more capable of independent action.

You can't stay home with the kids? Your work won't let you be home with the baby? You can't be home when the kids get out of school? Then why did you have kids?

Well ok. A lot of the problems aren't being addressed. I don't think I can address all of them here, but the big one is taxes.

Up to about the middle of the last century, most mothers stayed home, took care of the homes and the kids, and generally supported the family while the father went to work and brought home the bacon.

Before you start detailing in your minds all the problems for Mommy in this arrangement, let's observe that it wasn't all plums and posies for Daddy, either. Before we start throwing blame around for the way the two sexes were built and the way the societies of man have arranged themselves since first sentience. The way to escape currently lies in personal responsibility: If you don't want children DON'T HAVE ANY.

That's a good plan for those few of us who haven't started late, (already have a family), but for those who have....well you have a family and that's your priority. Deal.

There are several reasons why it's come to this. The biggest one is government. We all pay (that is, those of us that are productive) around half of our productivity to the police state--up from around ten percent in the fifties. We're told that it's an exchange for various services that could be provided by no one but government.

Not true.

The services in question were provided far better (leaving aside technological progress) back then than now, in spite of all the money currently being taken from you.

Not only is government very poor at providing these services, but they "charge" a lot of money for them. And, your freedom. Writer L Neil Smith estimates, maybe conservatively, that these services, crime prevention, streets and roads, schools, medical care, etc, etc, along with all the other goods and services we buy, would cost about one-eighth the current costs were ther no taxes and no government regulation.

How does this relate to O'Reilly and his desire to keep drugs away from kids? Well, for openers, would alleviate the need for both parents to work outside the home. The one that stays home can teach the benefits of a moral, productive, purposeful life to the youngsters, she (or he) can be there when Zachariah, Jr asks the critical questions about hockey and why he shouldn't stick the cute girl's ponytail into the inkwell. She can be around to discuss the changes that are happening in budding young Myrtle's body and how to get the ink out of her hair.

Drugs, other than aspirin and the odd dosage given by the family doctor, won't become an issue because the kids will have already been forewarned and forearmed properly by their parents, not by anonymous jack-booted thugs from DEA at your neighborhood children's prison. And they'll have better things to do. Fuddling the brain with short-circuit inducing chemicals will be seen as a waste of the time he could be spending building his (or her) own personal aircraft. Or flying it across town to meet that special speed skating champion who'll need a massage after the race. They'll be learning to live and prosper in an adult world.

We don't need a "War on Drugs" or a "War on Poverty" that purposefully gives society both more drugs and more poverty. Mostly, we need to be left alone.

Col. Hogan