Reply #120: Not really

[Asgaya Dihi]

I know you don't mean to, but what you're doing is more what I was talking about. Rather than taking what I said at face value you tell me what I mean by it, I read it as issues to ignore. Really? I said that?

The world is full of issues, there's the war, abortion, free speech and press, and so on. Who covers all of them all the time? We've made a choice to ignore the rest as unworthy somehow? Don't ascribe meaning that wasn't stated, that's why we can't get past the start of these types of debates.

The fight I'm in DOES cover women, and men, and children, and this nation and the rest of them. It's a matter of the most good to the most people, where we can best devote our time. The drug industry was at 400 billion dollar a year in the 1990's, it's likely grown by now and that was about 8% of all international trade. We're facing weapons bought with it in one nation after another around the world and the ones that don't come after us do rebel against their own and support crime and disruption. Our death rates for hard drugs have climbed by several times rather than dropping, and lifetime use is up rather than down. We've increased the size of our prisons and jails by over 6 times in size and created criminals out of kids who made a poor choice on the wrong corner. We've made our prisons into nightmares that look an awful lot like what happened with the abuse in Iraq in some cases, and it doesn't even make the news most of the time.

Don't make quick assumptions about people. It's a matter of the most good for the largest numbers, stopping the largest amount of damage possible. We can't do it all every day, so we hit the spots that'll do the most good.