MAILBOX / BY NORTH COAST JOURNAL READERS
◼ Ignorant Little Snots
(NOV. 18, 2010)
Editor:
At Mattole School in Petrolia this election season, the 5th through 8th graders spent a couple of weeks discussing the various propositions. According to my grandson, there was strong opposition to Proposition 19, and at the school ballot box it got only three votes (“Prop. 19, R.I.P.” Nov. 11).
Assuming these children reflect their parents it is hard not to feel cynical and sad. The War on Drugs is as destructive as our other wars, a murderously violent security policy intended to create the right environment for resource extraction and corporate exploitation. Domestically it is the modern version of Jim Crow.
These happily oblivious families might as well be voting for war because they work in the armaments business. They’ve evidently forgotten neighbors whose lives were mutilated by brutal arrests and desperate legal proceedings. They need go no farther than Eureka to encounter people who’ve emerged from long prison sentences in debt, blackballed from employment and living in fear of being thrown back in prison again for a trifle.
All arguments against Prop. 19 are casuistry, and its defeat has no silver lining.
Ellen Taylor - Meth Advocate
War on Drugs is war on our own people
Ellen Taylor
03/11/2007
Mike Goldsby, a highly-respected local expert in drug addiction, declared in last week's My Word opinion, “I have nothing good to say about methamphetamines.”
The estimated 1.4 million users in the U.S. would disagree. Productivity-oriented professionals with demanding careers praise the increased alertness afforded by meth. Timber fallers, mill workers, truck drivers, and others in dangerous occupations extol the stamina it provides. The military has always depended upon meth as a source of courage and quick reaction time. Poor people, trapped in multiple low-paying jobs or the exhausting paperwork demands of public assistance, emphasize its empowering and antidepressant effect.
These people agree that, like other drugs, meth can be fatal. But its high morbidity and mortality, they would add, rest in the fact that its use is illegal.
Like marijuana, also a medicine, meth is a multibillion-dollar criminal industry. There is naturally violence where such huge profits are to be made.
As revealed by Gary Webb in his San Jose Mercury News articles on crack cocaine, successful drug networks involve protection and exploitation by government agencies, including law enforcement. Police departments flourish on grants for drug interdiction. The domestic cost of the War on Drugs was $51 billion in 2006.
The penal system, increasingly privatized, prospers as well. The public pays an annual $27,000 for each of 2.5 million prisoners. As a society, we are invested in this industry: Some cities are almost exclusively supported by their prisons.
I recently attended a conference, “Methamphetamine, Hepatitis and HIV,” in Salt Lake City, where drug policy analysts described “set and setting” as determinants of how a drug or medicine will affect an individual.
The law enforcement vendetta against meth, and media use of such slogans as “meth kills,” linking it to deviance, disease and violence, provides a hostile setting, and amounts to a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Public opinion as reflected in Times-Standard op-eds echo the official contempt. One guest opinion praised the policies of MaoTse-tung for summarily executing drug offenders. Another called it “terrorism,” and suggested soliciting Homeland Security money.
The recent killings by the Eureka police were attributed to the victims' use of meth, which is rapidly becoming a license to kill. Even Mike Goldsby, in saluting law enforcement's “vital role in holding addicts accountable,” regretted that “there are not enough police or jails to arrest, convict and incarcerate every addict.”
A declaration of war is an open invitation to ignore the rights of individuals in the name of a more urgent destiny. The War on Drugs is no exception.
Harsher sentences than for murder, illegal searches and seizures, intrusive urine testing, property forfeitures, disenfranchisement, ineligibility for public support, housing, school loans or food stamps, loss of children: Fourth, fifth, eighth and fourteenth amendment protections are widely denied meth users.
Demonization of meth cripples democracy. A minority of our citizens even votes, let alone takes an active role in policy decisions which will affect their and their childrens' lives.
Involvement in illegal and socially-condemned activities has estranged large segments of the population from political life. Paranoia prevents users from exercising their first amendment rights to express their opinions. Thus, in a democracy already handicapped by apathy, a stigmatized class is prevented from defending their own interests.
This has powerful implications. One op-ed reported that 70 percent of children in some Humboldt County schools come from “meth homes.” Urine tests at local clinics confirm wide use.
Paul Gahlinger, M.D., commander of the Davis County Jail in Utah, observed that his inmates, 65 percent meth convicts and one-third female, attribute their incarceration not to meth but to the chaotic problems of poverty. They have no plan to stop using.
It is evident that meth is endemic, a street medicine used to treat endemic conditions of life in the American culture of speed, performance, achievement, self-absorption, alienation, waste and neglect.
The War on Drugs amounts to a war on our own people. It is contrary to the precepts of Christianity and all other religions, and destructive to the foundations of democracy.
We must treat the human conditions which cause suffering, instead of demonizing the medicine that relieves the symptoms, if we wish to restore family and human values to our communities.
Ellen Taylor lives in Petrolia.
This Op-Ed was originally posted at http://www.times-standard.com/fastsearchresults/ci_5418494
***
There was a LETTER TO THE EDITOR in response:
Meth victim's mom: Help stop this killer
Author: My Word by Suzi Fregeau
Date: March 18, 2007
Publication: Times-Standard (Eureka, CA)
I read, with amazement, the recent opinion of Ellen Taylor, “War on Drugs is a war on our own people.” I cannot for one minute understand why any sensible individual would support, in any way, the use of this drug. To imply that this drug is helpful for productivity-oriented professionals with demanding careers, that it is necessary to increase the alertness of truck drivers, timber fallers, mill workers and others in dangerous occupations is ludicrous at best.
Since... (truncated, available from Times Standard paid archives)
***
Discussion at watchpaul
Discussion on Anon.R.mous' Super Happy Fun Blog
***
It is a patriotic duty to reject 'abusive' rulers 5/13/2007
by Ellen Taylor, Petrolia,
“When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary ... .”
So begins our founding document and spiritual wellspring as a nation, the Declaration of Independence. It has inspired oppressed peoples around the world for more than two centuries. With dignity and brilliant clarity, it documents the precise moment of a people’s arrival at the limits of tolerance, and their resolve to repudiate a government that is destructive of the ends of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
As we memorized the preamble in school, our patriotism was nurtured by our forefathers’ principled repudiation of injurious authority. In the Declaration, and in our other founding document, the Constitution, they have bequeathed to us a solemn responsibility: to reject any ruler who is guilty of “usurpations and abuses” if, in the course of human events, it again becomes necessary.
It has.
We have in the White House a president who is as mad as King George III, to whom the Declaration of Independence is addressed. This is borne out in analysis of his statements and public appearances. Determination of how he got that way will someday no doubt be examined by psychiatrists or toxicologists. They will compare George W. Bush’s behavior with that of other mad leaders who created havoc in previous centuries. He must be removed from office, and his vicious political apparatus dismantled.
The high crimes and misdemeanors of the Bush administration are giddying in number, magnitude and audacity. They have been enumerated by retired generals, civil rights organizations and government officials. U.S. Rep. John Conyers, the chairperson of the House Judiciary Committee, introduced a bill with 38 co-sponsors last year to investigate the impeachable offenses of Bush and Dick Cheney. House Resolution 333, presented to the House two weeks ago by presidential candidate and U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, begins the process of impeaching the vice president.
Articles of impeachment listed by these groups and individuals include:
+ waging aggressive war and committing war crimes, crimes against the peace and crimes against humanity;
+ lying to the American people and to Congress, providing a fraudulent rationale for war;
+ violating international treaties and federal laws prohibiting torture;
+ retaliating against witnesses and individuals who oppose administration policy and leaking national security intelligence for political purposes;
+ disseminating fraudulent information with the objective of making war on Iran;
+ illegally threatening Iran with a nuclear blitzkrieg — a country which has not attacked anybody in more than 200 years;
+ endangering our national security by violating the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty Article 6, which prohibits the further manufacture of nuclear weapons;
+ allowing the U.S. military to violate the Geneva accords by targeting of civilians and civic infrastructure, by destroying priceless archaeological heritage, failing to protect civilians, using weapons such as land mines and cluster bombs, depleted uranium, napalm and white phosphorus, which target civilians, and failing to investigate those officials responsible for these crimes;
+ conducting illegal electronic surveillance of U.S. citizens and others;
+ appending “signing statements” to legislation passed by Congress, which illegally assert the right to ignore the legislation;
+ displaying criminal negligence regarding the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe, which resulted in more than 1,500 preventable deaths;
+ violation of the 14th Amendment’s equal protection provision in the ongoing neglect of Hurricane Katrina victims;
+ suspending the writ of habeas corpus by ordering the indefinite detention of so-called “enemy combatants”; and
+ corrupting the rule of law in the Department of Justice for political purposes.
Support for impeachment is entering the mainstream. The Vermont Senate passed a resolution recommending it, and it has been proposed in the Illinois Legislature as well. The growing numbers of U.S. soldiers who are dying as a tribute to Bush’s empire is met with increasing horror. As funds for health care, education, national security and environmental protection shrivel, the public increasingly views the 2008 defense budget of $803 billion — larger by far than the rest of the world combined — with hostility.
But many in the country likewise reject the politically hamstrung Democrats, who took impeachment “off the table” and then voted for $125 billion in supplemental appropriations for the war. They regard the Democrats’ vetoed funding resolution as feeble, and for good reasons. It was nonbinding. The president could obtain a waiver for any of its provisions. It did not outlaw an attack on Iran. It did not call for the closure of bases in Iraq. It allowed for the continued presence of 90 percent of the estimated 125,000 foreign mercenaries.
Even after “withdrawal,” the U.S. would have been allowed to keep up to 80,000 troops in Iraq, serving in various capacities. It required the Iraqi government to pass an oil law designed to benefit the international oil conglomerates. It imposed fantastically unrealistic “benchmarks” on a country for whose descent into utter chaos the Bush administration is entirely responsible.
Impeachment of Bush or Cheney must not be viewed as a distraction from the urgent business of ending the war. On the contrary, it may be the only way to end it and dissipate Bush’s insane fiction of permanent war. It is a solemn obligation to law enforcement, and on it rests our reputation with our posterity and with the rest of the world.
Copyright (C) 2005, The Eureka Reporter. All rights reserved.Newspapers should stop trying to mislead in news section
###
9/10/2005
Dear Editor,
For an entire week now, I’ve been stupefied with amazement each morning when I open the papers, to read yet again about Salzman.
What terrible malady has overthrown the minds of our local editors? Why do they kneel so abjectly in the snows of Canossa, vying with each other over who can make the most self-abasing confession? “How gullible we were!” they wail. How foolishly trusting, betrayed by this Machiavellian manipulator and who knows how many other princes and princesses of darkness, at whose motives “we can only guess.”
Whatever those motives were, they had the peculiar consequence of unhinging your reason. Or else a different force is intimidating you into these humiliating postures. It’s clear that poor Mr. Wyatt was intimidated by somebody into bringing all this down on his friend Salzman’s head.
Get a grip, editors. Take a deep breath, Supervisor Geist. Your “I-am-not-a-puppet” speech resonated too well with Nixon’s “I am not a crook.” You don’t want people to start seeing a puppet up there every Tuesday.
And Salzman was not trying to look like an army by getting friends to sign his letters. “Army” is too destructive an image. He was slipping just a little more of his copious analysis of events – an analysis, I might add, welcomed by many readers – into the too-tiny space allowed to each ordinary individual in the newspapers. And now, on this ridiculously irrelevant pretext, that space has snapped shut, like an oyster.
Emperors and others who crawl on their knees to Canossa always want a penance to obtain absolution. So, here’s a penance, echoing to you from R. Trent Williams’ (Richard Salzman’s) last letter to be printed on your pages. Stop editorializing in your news section, especially when the intent is to mislead. You’ll feel a lot better, and you might get up the courage to open your shell again.
Ellen Taylor
Petrolia
***
8/9/04 Useful Information Gleaned
From Nazi-Era Atrocities by Ellen Taylor
(Editor’s note: Because of the length of this column, it was split into two parts. Part one was in last week’s Eureka Reporter.)
A frequently asked question in the years since World War II is how Germans could commit the atrocities they did, and here also we can find information useful to the present.
Studies have been made since the war which selected groups of ordinary German workingmen and investigated their reaction to committing atrocities. There was an overwhelming initial reaction of horror and revulsion.
After a few assignments, however, the men were able successfully to dehumanize their victims and approach their obligations as merely an unpleasant cleanup.
They came to believe they were serving a higher cause, much as our soldiers are told they are saving American lives when they "light up” vehicles filled with passengers, or commit atrocities against prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
Some who obey orders to commit atrocities suffer deep psychic trauma. Others, as was recently admitted by numerous soldiers to the L.A. Times, actually come to enjoy it. And, like the German soldiers, they would all, if confronted with the atrocities they committed, claim that they were just following orders.
Very few have the knowledge or resources to be influenced by Article 8 of the Charter of the Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, which states that “a person acting pursuant to orders from his government or a superior does not release him from responsibility and international law.”
This important piece of our heritage from the Nazis has been allowed to fade into obscurity.
German or American, the techniques employed to bring peoples to wage aggressive war are the same. The culture of irresponsible obedience must change if future holocausts are to be avoided.
The crime of aggressive war killed 60 million people in World War II. The largest fraction of these were Chinese civilians, whose obscure and often horrific extinction was overlooked in your editorial, there being no Holocaust Museums or Wiesenthal Centers to commemorate them.
Millions of soldiers from many nations died, and just because they were of an age and social class which is designated for sacrifice in war does not make their deaths any less horrible. Crimes against the peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity, they all bring about miserable lives and deaths.
These crimes are as prevalent and as virulent as they were 60 years ago.
Life in Samarra or Fallujah, with people murdered and maimed daily, and precious historic culture destroyed, must be similar to many Polish or Rumanian cities during World War II.
There are still enormous holocausts such as Rwanda, Congo, Sudan. Is it not a sort of genocide to allow 25 million impoverished inhabitants of Africa to die of AIDS?
The reason they are impoverished is because colonial and imperialist nations extracted their natural resource wealth and thereby became developed and powerful.
The term Nazi can certainly be trivialized for purposes of propaganda. But the Nazis were humans, and thus no different from ourselves. The better we understand this, the more conscious we are of our own terrible capabilities, the more hope there will be to eradicate from the world the sorts of crimes they committed.
Thank you for your (editor’s notebook).
(Ellen Taylor is a Petrolia resident. She was present in Germany during the Nuremburg trials. Her father, the late Brigadier General Telford Taylor, was chief prosecutor during the American trials which followed the international trials referenced above.)
(Editor’s note: The editor’s notebook column was referring to the use of Nazi in American society. It was not a column on other wars of genocide that occurred in China, the Soviet Union and other countries since World War II.)
###
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