Time to Cut the Apron Strings

Well, here’s some more change you can believe in. Right, marijuana remains in the same league as heroin. Makes you wonder about the quality of heroin the Obama Administration is using. Because there is no way a sane person can conclude that marijuana should logically remain in the same category as heroin. Not that I think the government has any authority to decide what plants people may or may not ingest.

Listen, this whole “War On Drugs” has been justified by the ridiculous need to “protect” the children. Now, yes, this is an excuse the government uses. But it is an excuse they’ve been using for several things ever since it became a government priority to treat adults like children, too. I, for one, am rather tired of this child-centric culture we find ourselves in. Everything now is, “We need to do this for the kids…” from junk food to guns to tobacco. Three things every American should have access to without whiners and weenies sitting up there as the gatekeepers of it.

Right, look what this War On Drugs has led to. The government now wants to tax and regulate “junk food” and sodas. Some states already have. “What about childhood obesity?!” Hey, you know what? We didn’t have a lot of fat kids back in my childhood days. Because their parents didn’t molly-coddle them. They were told to go out and play—or chores would be found for them to do. No one said, “Mommy, I’m bored!” because Mommy would tell you to go mow the flippin’ yard. You were told to eat the vegetables on your plate—all of them—or you didn’t get dessert. Period. You didn’t get your own TV. Parents didn’t buy you soda and crap like that. You saved your allowance and rode your bike down to the store and got the soda and candy bar on your own dime. But because parents are too danged lazy to be parents, we need federal regulations, school programs at billions of dollars a pop, and several new sales taxes to make bratty, whiny children out of all of us.

How about tobacco? The government decided something needed to be “done” about that and now cops can strangle people to death if they violate those nifty new sales taxes. Back in my day, no teen had trouble getting cigarettes. Many chicks had boyfriends that were 18 and they’d get the smokes from those dudes. Of course, that was illegal, too, because the chicks were under 18 and sex between them and an 18 year old was statutory rape. Huh. By 17, my grandmother had been married a few years and had a kid. How about them apples? Right, how many people married right now would have been breaking the law had they met in high school? But we need to keep tobacco out of the hands of kids by making it harder for adults to buy. In my generation, if you found something in the hands of your kids that they were not supposed to have, you spanked them until they turned loose of it.

Guns, sure, we need to ban those for the kids. Except when the government needs to put their guns into the hands of kids and ship them off to die in another futile war someplace, am I correct? The government sits up there and says things like this: “More 18-year-olds have died from alcohol-related accidents than died in the Vietnam War!” Anyone notice the irony there? In order to find some shocking number of kids that died senseless deaths, the government had to reach back and use the casualty figures from a no-win war they shipped kids off to fight. Getting back to guns, you have to be 21 to buy a handgun. But between 18 and 21, you can be part of a tactical nuclear weapons crew in the United States military and incinerate hundreds of thousands of human beings if ordered to do so. Gosh, I suppose we can thank our lucky stars they’ll do it with a tactical nuclear weapon and not a handgun! Plus, they won’t be able to celebrate that mass murder with a good, stiff drink because they’re not old enough to drink alcohol, either.

See now, doesn’t the government do a stellar job of protecting our kids? Especially in the military where I saw teens abused, beaten, and finally, commit suicide except the government called that “good training”. Not to mention the female trainees raped by cadre at AIT. Little things the government only now admits some several frickin’ decades later. Yeah, see, that’s why you jokers put polished stainless steel mirrors in the barracks latrines. So trainees would not break glass from glass mirrors and slash their wrists with it. Tell me more about how much you really take care of the kids you deceive into “defending” this ridiculous little anthill you call the “greatest nation on Earth”. Great how? The suicide rate among teens?

See, the government thinks this all boils down to booze, junk food, smokes, weed, and guns. It doesn’t. It boils down to the fact that we’re living in a police state and no one wants to admit it. They think we ought to molly-coddle kids, not let parents spank them when they need it, and basically have them grow up in this bubble where everything is defined as “good” or “bad” by the government. Right, hey kids, don’t smoke, drink, eat junk food, or do bong hits because the government says that’s bad. But enlist in the army, pick up a weapon, and go shoot these people who’ve done you no harm just because the government tells you they are the “enemy”.

Our priorities are so backwards, we need a time warp to straighten them out. We need to go back to a time when it wasn’t any of the government’s danged business what adults did. Nor was it a policy to use kids as a reason to deny adults the things adults enjoy. Kids will get access to things regardless of laws. Here in Arizona, there’s some new group of “concerned parents” whining about medical marijuana, saying it needs to be made harder to acquire because the “kids” are getting a hold of it. Hey, look here. This is a medicine we are talking about. Since when does “kids getting a hold of it” dictate medical policy? Oh, right, just as soon as the government enters into it and rules against patients in favor of a bunch of snot-nosed brats in need of spankings and groundings. This isn’t a government issue, people. This is a parenting issue. And if those parents are too dang lazy to parent their own kids, then that speaks volumes about that family. But it should speak nothing of public policy. Period.

People already have to jump through hoops to get medical marijuana that they are not required to in order to have access to other medicines. Here goes the federal government a few days ago, telling us that “science” doesn’t back up claims as to the medical legitimacy of marijuana as a medicine. Oh, really? Is this not the same government that told us we could win the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Afghanistan War, and the Iraq War? Excuse me, but the Constitution does not back up any claims to the legitimacy of this government! And “science”?! Science recently gave us the wonderful “gifts” of nuclear weapons, nerve gas, and ballistic missiles able to deliver those splendid products of science to innocent people.

Here we have a government that decides that since some parents can’t parent their kids, then they’ll step in and parent all of us. But the reality is, the kids are just an excuse. Because if the government actually cared about those kids, they wouldn’t ship them off to die in some BS war someplace those kids can’t even find on a map. If they really cared about those kids, they wouldn’t have done atmospheric nuclear weapons testing so long that dangerous levels of Strontium 90 were found in the teeth of American kids during the 1950s. Yes, and we’ll never know what effect that’s had on the genetics of the generations which descended from them. Because the government controls that science, too, along with the “science” which claims marijuana is not a medicine despite it having been used as such by humanity for thousands of years.

Don’t give me any more of this crap about the kids. All we’re getting out of this “concern” is more laws, more regulations, more restrictions, more bans, and more taxes. And do you see any actual beneficial effect on these kids? No! Because guess what? If the parents in the home aren’t being parents, those kids will get a hold of anything those parents don’t care enough to punish them for having. What, the government thinks a sales tax on soda will keep kids from drinking a gallon of it a day? Ha! The parents are the ones buying it for them! The kids don’t care what it costs and the parents won’t want to put up with the whining, so they’ll just suck it up and pay the extra tax. Which, of course, is what the government knows. Easy money for the government to then squander on more useless government programs, studies, agencies, and employees.

If you want to be “concerned”, then be concerned in and for your own home. Not mine. Your kids don’t live in my house. So you have no business regulating what I do there. And if you’re worried about your kids getting a hold of something, then I highly recommend punishing them if you catch them. Of course, that’s probably illegal to say, too. I know, I know, it might damage their self-esteem to punish them. So you give them time-outs or sit them down and “talk” to them. How’s that working for you? Right, you ask the government to come in and help. Yeah, well, ask the government into YOUR home. I don’t need or want them in mine.

There. I said it. I know lots of people are thinking it. Sitting and watching screaming brats in public and the parents sit there and try reasoning with a 5-year-old like he’s 50 and not 5. That’s the whole problem. In my day, we got spanked. In this day, the government comes in to give all of us a time-out. The whole dang country in one massive time-out, grounded for things we didn’t do. Just because other people can’t discipline their kids. Well, hey, that’s not my problem, people. It’s well past time kids were not seen or heard as reasons for government nanny state intrusions into our adult lives. It’s time to cut the apron strings, people.

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