Saturday, September 9. 2006
I’ve been spending a little while thinking about certain things that have gone wrong in society, and I’ve been looking for possible reasons that they have occurred. In particular, I have been trying to ascertain why things like school shootings, gang violence, and increased drug use tend to occur here, but rarely in other countries. Only recently has this trend seemed to present itself, so I attempted to examine possible simple causes for such a rapid degradation in condition, and I found one staggeringly obvious, blazingly counterintuitive source of all evil: trying to do good.
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Has anyone noticed that all of the recent problems in school coincide with several things? The first and most readily accessible are increases in the prevalence and impact of television, video games, and music. All three have rising amounts of violence, gore, and glorification of violence and nonconformity. Media, in general, tends to be traditionally the normal scapegoat for the ills of society. In the past, jazz music—clearly from the devil— “caused” children of the 20’s to go apeshit, while rock music also “caused” children of the 50’s to go apeshit. Well, not really apeshit, but become peace-loving hippies. In any case, plenty of media has been blamed for the “corruption” of children.
Of course, the “corruption” of children until the 80’s pales in comparison to the actual corruption of children from the 90’s onward. Clearly, television and movies alone cannot be to blame, as the glorification of violence in the media ranging from westerns where cowboys murdered Indians to crime shows and movies where people were shot continuously happened long before the 80’s. The remainder media argument that does hold some validity resides in video games, for, they are quite real, and at least for me, personally, do tend to provoke increases in my generalized temper. But, why have video games become so popular, and why are they so widespread?
The answer to that may reside in an otherwise seemingly unrelated variable in the grand equation: laws. While movies, television, and video games have only been targeted by minimalist laws, society in general has experienced several lawmaking shifts that particularly target younger people, and I argue that these, more than anything, are causing the greatest amounts of damage to children. So, let’s examine two of them, shall we?
- Tobacco Prohibition.History lesson time. Since the inception of this country, tobacco has been central to the lives of countless amounts of people. It has always been completely unregulated, and it was the staple crop that started this country going from the beginning. Arguably, without the tobacco trade, the early middle and southern colonies of the present-day United States would have withered and died away. Until the invention of the cotton gin, tobacco still outsold cotton-related industries, including textiles, for centuries. That all changed once we became an industrial superpower and relied more on manufactured goods than tobacco products.
In April of 1970, Nixon started the ball rolling by banning cigarette ads on television. That same year, the Controlled Substances Act passed into law, thus establishing the present-day role of prescriptions and the illegalities of possessing certain drugs. This, alone, is a topic upon which we can expand and discuss the role of the resultant black market emergence, but that’s a totally different topic altogether. We’re here to talk about nicotine.
The next most notable, and arguably the most dangerous step came in 1988, when the sale of cigarettes and other tobacco products to minors became illegal in all 50 states. Even worse, more recently, the sale age has been raised to 19 in various states, including Alabama and Utah. Several other states are considering doing the same, if not raising it higher.
Here’s the problem: even though I absolutely hate cigarettes and think that they’re evil and bad for your health, they provide a valuable, 100% legal high that keeps people happy, focused, concentrated, and subdued. It always has, and kids have been able to smoke and chew tobacco for centuries. Is it bad for them? Absolutely. Did we just find that out relatively recently? Yes.
But, the problem is that there is no easy alternative to the recently-prohibited tobacco products. Teens can’t even purchase the nicotine gum to help them kick the habit even if they wanted to. Plus, all antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications are prescription-only and consequently expensive and hard to obtain thanks to the Controlled Substances Act. Cigarettes, while bad for your health, have historically been relatively inexpensive, while providing similar (albeit more addictive) results, readily accessible from the local supermarket for $3 bucks as opposed to $300.
If you ask almost any cigarette-smoker, they’ll tell you that smoking takes the edge off. It reduces their anxiety and depression, and it gives them something to do. In fact, nicotine and its metabolites are being highly researched as potential treatments for various diseases, most notably ADHD (which is also a relatively new disease) increases of which directly coincide with tobacco prohibition and anti-tobacco campaigns. Nicotine also acts on areas of the brain that are stimulated by sexual release, as well, which also helps to explain the recent rise in levels of teen sex. After all, if you can’t find a way to suppress the desire to get your freak on, you’ll do the next best thing—get your freak on.
So let’s recap: there are no school, church, or public shootings for 300 years (all the while tobacco is 100% legal for teenagers to grow and buy), but less than 10 years after tobacco is outlawed for kids, school shootings, violence, and pre-marital orgies start increasing dramatically, and people don’t really know why. Video games? Perhaps kids are just trying to “get the edge off” and “relieve anxiety” from their stressful, over-structured days induced by parental pressure contained within a sterile, drug-free environment. In the past, teenagers would have been able to buy a pack of smokes to get the same relief, but now they’re forced to engage in drug-free activities to release their rage and frustration, many by playing first-person shooters/drivers like Grand Theft Auto.
Could that all be coincidental? Sure. But, I’d like to think it’s poetic justice. Short-sighted government paternalism intended for the betterment of kids and society backfires on a massive fucking scale. Irony never smelled so sweet.
- Alcohol Prohibition. The joy of alcohol prohibition has a similar story. We all know about how social conservatives passed a constitutional amendment to ban the consumption, sale, and distribution of intoxicating liquors for beverage purposes within the last century. We also know how it backfired on a massive scale and caused a huge murder rate hike while it was in action due to the bootlegger black market. Clearly, adults wanted their liquor. Of course, tobacco was still available for kids and other adults, plus a bunch of other fun medications were still available from the local pharmacist, particularly all of the drugs that were pre-Controlled Substances Act, including morphine and marijuana. It all became history, though, when defeat was admitted and the amendment was repealed.
Then life was good for around 50 years. That is, until someone thought it was a good idea to ban anyone under 21 from buying or possessing alcohol during the mid-80’s. The idea that it’d help prevent drunk driving was extremely sound, and actually showed results. It did, in fact, help prevent drunk driving to a certain extent, even though the results were relatively short-lived (it’s back on the rise again) due to the hyper-polarized neo-prohibitionism that even the Mothers Against Drunk Driving founder no longer endorses.
The real problem is that now that alcohol and tobacco are illegal for minors to possess, what do they have to “reduce anxiety” and “take the edge off”? Nothing—and the results are showing. Due to the logistics involved in preventing minors from drinking, most people under the age of 21 aren't allowed to enter nightclubs to dance and have fun on a Friday or Saturday night. They can't even walk over to a neighborhood tavern to have a beer and play pool. Instead, they are forced to drive to secluded parties, then, depending on how noisy the party is, drunkenly grab all the beer, pack into a car, and drive away from the police who are busting the party-- all in the name of preventing drunken driving. Even college kids who travel to 18 and up clubs effectively have to binge drink before going out, drive to where they're going (as the liquor is kicking in), sneak drinks while there, then drive miles back to their homes or dorms while being most likely still drunk.
Now I’m totally in favor of a drug-free society, but reality decrees that that can never happen—at least, not without adverse effects. Outlawing alcohol AND tobacco for minors reflects exactly that. People complain about kids going apeshit, but, I don’t know about you, but I can’t say that I wouldn’t do the same if I was in some of their shoes. Thank god my mom would have never cared if I had smoked (even though I never did) and always offered me liquor (even though I never drank it). Why did I never need these things? Because I had an extremely loving family, my life was good, and my parents left me the fuck alone—so long as I did well in school (which came easy for me).
But, not everyone has a good life, and some people really do need drugs to get through the day. Only a small percentage of the population is strong enough to get through the day 100% sober. Around 80% of the country gets through the day on caffeine, at least, and, that’s not counting the smokers and the people who also have a beer or cocktail with lunch. I would even argue, arbitrarily, that around 99% of the country ingests or smokes a widely-available, mild-altering legal substance such as caffeine, nicotine, or alcohol during any given day. Why can’t our kids do the same thing like they always have been able to do?
Does legal tobacco and alcohol harm them in the long run? Most likely, but nobody can argue that a teenager (who’s only a teenager for 7 years), does irreparable damage to his body on such a large scale that it pales in comparison to the damage done in his remaining 50 years of life where they’re uninhibited by purchasing age laws. If anything, it’s quite the opposite. The younger the kid, the more springy and elastic they are. Any minor neurological damage done before age 25 has an exceptionally good chance of being repaired, among other reasons, because neuronal axons still get myelinated, thus showing mitotic cycles in otherwise mitotically-inactive cells. Thus, if you wanted to protect the most people, you’d do the exact opposite of how things stand today—legalize cigarettes and tobacco for anyone UNDER the age of 21, while making it illegal for people OVER the age of 21.
Thus, the way I see it, give the little shits alcohol and tobacco. They’ve been able to do it for the last 300 years—all during the time that this country was developing into the glory it is today—and everything so far has turned out fine… until they were outlawed.
If a kid wants to die of lung cancer or liver failure when he hits 50, so be it: at least he’s not going to mow down people with an AK-47 in the middle of the lunchroom when he’s twelve-- all because some he failed a history test or some dickhead pushed the him over the edge by calling him a fag. Instead, he can smoke, get high, get drunk, and flunk out school—just like he would have been able to do in the 60’s and every decade before that, even during the times in which it was commonplace for that same twelve year old to carry a rifle around.
Personally, I'd like to blow a few heads off myself, but the joys of liquor and weed remind me that it's not worth the hassle of cleaning the scene and dissolving down the bodies. The moral of the story? Lower the age limits of tobacco and alcohol so that teens can buy them again, otherwise they'll continue to find comfort in activities that relieve the pressure (i.e. shooting classmates), and they'll seek out people who won't ask for I.D. (i.e. drug dealers) to get drugs that are a thousand times more powerful and dangerous than anything over the counter (i.e. heroin and crystal meth).
Please: For the sake of the children, undo what you did for the sake of the children.
Cheers.
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[...] I’ve been spending a little while thinking about certain things that have gone wrong in society, and I’ve been looking for possible reasons that they have occurred. [...]
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