Sunday, February 08, 2009

War, Bonds and Drugs



Looking like photographers for some African safari documentary, a gaggle of cameramen were set up under a tent to protect them from the elements in front of the Federal Building on Golden Gate Thursday afternoon.



Instead of trying to capture elusive animal footage, however, they were attempting to get a shot of the retired baseball superstar Barry Bonds, who was once more being humiliated in a federal court because he had supposedly lied about having taken steroids.



A few feet away, being thoroughly ignored by this expensive conglomeration of media, were the old peace vigil group pointedly protesting the waste of trillions of dollars and millions of lives in our invasion of various countries in the Middle East.



Who gives a rat's ass about peace and ethical behavior, however, when there are billions of dollars to be made in the "Drug War" and its subsidiary industries? These include government bureaucracies, the prison industrial complex, the judiciary, huge chunks of law enforcement, weapons manufacturers, not to mention the providers and distributors of officially unsanctioned drugs. In a world economy that is collapsing visibly in front of our eyes, the last place we need to be focusing our money and energy on is the institutionalized persecution of drug users.



The remains of the mainstream media are certainly not helping. Throw in a sports celebrity angle and they literally go berserk, as we've witnessed with Bonds and more recently with the swimmer Michael Phelps and his marijuana bong photo. Unless those priorities are changed, this planet is doomed.

2 comments:

zoo said...

aha, you're right, poor Phelps, can't a kid do what a kid needs to do!ffff
hey, I saw the new Richard Kelly movie, I got to tell you I really liked it , a complete mess, check it out
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405336/

Matthew Hubbard said...

You may have heard that Alex Rodriguez, who was supposed to be Mr. Clean in all this, has now been outed as testing positive for steroids in a report from 2003 that was supposed to be sealed. Baseball writers are doing what they do best, acting like idiots.

I thought as my generation grew older there would be a more serious consideration of what drugs really are, what is dangerous and what isn't as dangerous, but this is just another example of me getting stuff completely wrong.