Posts Tagged → drugs
Drugs are destroying the next generation
Over the past weeks, the stories in the press and among friends and family about destructive drug use are overwhelming. Overwhelming in number and in sadness, these reports spell a problem for the next generation.
Young people in their teens, twenties, dying from drug overdoses. These are otherwise together and with-it young people, who looked forward to fulfilling careers and family life. Or going to jail, as did one young man I have known since he was born.
My own two older kids report back on their brushes with “casual” drug use, describing to their mother and I with some hilarity the carefree antics of their fellows using hard drugs and “recreational” drugs, like marijuana.
But nothing is funny about this. It is terrifying.
Yesterday I read that 33,000 Americans died from drug overdoses in 2015. This is not your grandfather’s “pot”; rather, it is an unknown witches’ brew of various toxins and addictive drugs all mixed together. Usually these mixes are designed by drug dealers to get people hooked, so they come and buy more drugs. But these mixes are killing a lot of people, or destroying their careers and their families.
At the Middle Paxton Township building this morning, I saw a flyer for an upcoming community meeting about opioid abuse. So many regular families have it.
Yesterday I sent two emails to my two daughters:
“Girls, I love you both so so so much. All your lives I’ve stayed up late comforting you when you were sick, or when you were anxious about social situations, or about school. Doing that is what fathers do, and I wish I could do it again now, because I am scared.
Now you are young adults and independent, living out of our home, and free to make even fatal decisions. Your mother and I are not near you to warn you, watch you, or stop you from making bad decisions. When your mother and I were young, very few bad decisions we could have made carried serious risk. Smoking marijuana was smoking a dried up leaf, and it either made you feel sick, or stupid.
Today, the risks from bad decisions are huge because the outcomes are so fast and are irreversible. Someone offers you marijuana and you think “what the heck, it’s just one puff,” but you don’t know what’s in it.
You know what is in so many marijuana cigarettes today? HEROIN.
HEROIN is bad by itself, but today not even heroin is heroin. Now it’s laced with other drugs.
You can’t only “try” heroin ONCE, because that ONE TIME leaves you an addict. Your life is over after you become an addict. There is no recovery.
Everything you do after “trying” heroin and cocaine is to try to get more drugs to satisfy the craving.
Your life goes downhill immediately after you try heroin. And cocaine.
I’m writing to you right now because story after story after story is coming in from news reports and from family and from friends about how the “little” drugs led to more powerful drugs, which led to the end of someone’s life. People we know, kids like you.
Kids who felt indestructible.
Bulletproof.
Indomitable.
Healthy.
On Friday I spoke with an old friend of mine. She’s a lawyer. She’s now a drug addict, getting divorced, losing her home, losing the man who loved her, losing her profession.
She said “Josh, I am so so scared. I have nowhere to go.”
The result of trying cocaine and heroin is either death, or drug addiction so powerful that the young person can no longer function at a professional or self-sustaining level.
Life is about making wise choices, smart choices. Drug use, illegal behavior, risky behavior like driving fast or walking alone, and sexual behavior have never before carried so much potential to destroy everything you and I have worked for, for your own success, so quickly.
DO NOT EVEN TRY DRUGS. There is no benefit to them at all.
NO DRUG IS COOL.
NO DRUG IS SAFE.
LEAVE THE COMPANY OF PEOPLE WHO USE DRUGS.
These people will pressure you to join them in their stupidity and misery, and your life will forever be over in the one second it takes for you to “just try” it.
MAKE SMART DECISIONS.
I love you both so very very much.
-Dad”
Bad guys are on the run around Harrisburg
Toldja so.
Last year, several critical essays I wrote about PA AG Kathleen Kane were widely published, long before other people felt safe enough, I guess, to jump on the band wagon.
Kane’s incompetence and corrupt behavior were evident within a few months of her arrival in the PA Attorney General seat. She only got worse and worse, and was on a downhill slide to the point where she has now been indicted by a grand jury. Imagine that.
I feel vindicated. Sadly.
Harrisburg’s top cop may go to jail, or be fined, disbarred, and barred from holding public office. It says a lot about politics, that her Breck Girl smile and slow-motion hair tosses were enough for her to get elected.
For the record, I believe that if Pennsylvania absolutely must have a Democrat AG, then Katie McGinty would be the right person. McGinty is every bit as liberal and political as Kane, but Katie is also way too smart to let it show or implement it so egregiously. So, we’d end up with a partisan professional and not the corrupt political hack we have now. That’d be an improvement.
An even better improvement would be Ed Marsico as AG. Ed Marsico is the stellar DA for Dauphin County, and he is so a-political that the Republican establishment has passed him over in the past. Can you imagine, an AG who simply does the job of prosecuting bad guys? How refreshing that would be.
On to Harrisburg City, my home town and my family’s home since at least 1745. It’s a place I care about a lot. We moved here from Washington, DC, to enjoy the high quality of life, easy commute, and low cost of living. I love living in Harrisburg.
Yes, the city has problems. OK, that is true and I think people are genuinely working to solve them, even as many of the same people have worked to exacerbate them because they stood to make money from them (think: Public Parking). But that is another story.
Here’s a story that is just now unfolding: Harrisburg has decided to hold on to its illegal anti-gun laws. Harrisburg City remains happily and blatantly in violation of two state laws barring any PA municipality from passing gun laws. The city has been served notice that they may get sued over this, a costly loss because the city will have to pay money damages and legal fees to the winner.
And of course, the gun laws they have do zero to punish criminals or limit crime. They are designed to punish law-abiding citizens and turn them into criminals, because the zealot prohibitionist crusaders pushing these laws are against guns per se.
Late last Friday night a deranged man attempted to forcefully enter my home through the front door. He was banging away at it, working over the handle hard, and shouting at us.
My wife and kids cowered on the kitchen floor, with Viv talking with a surly 911 dispatcher (who actually yelled at me over the phone); our guests were in the basement.
I stood with a pistol pointed at the door, waiting for the guy to come barging through. Every warning I shouted to him through the door elicited a curse-filled response and harder efforts to get through.
Even I was scared. Someone trying that hard to break into your home is going to do damage once he gets inside.
Ten minutes later the Harrisburg police arrived and caught him, two doors up the street. They were professional and friendly to us taxpayers, and they used force to capture the crazy man because he was violent. I watched him fight with them and try to kick their police dog, Bo. He had some white powder drugs on him and acted like he was insane. Case in point here: Drugs are bad, m’kay?
Without my gun, immediately accessible, our family was a sitting duck for this guy.
We were lucky that he did not come through a ground floor window. Sure, I would have shot and killed him had he entered our home, but who needs that? And what about the other citizens who are neither armed nor prepared or able to defend themselves effectively against intruders?
Let’s ask the obvious question: What about “when seconds count the police are only minutes away” do you not understand, Mayor Eric Papenfuse?
Why are your illegal, ineffective gun laws more important than the safety of my family?
What makes people on the Left so cocksure about their illegal behavior? It must have something to do with the tradition of Leftist protests always being “right,” a mentality that undergirds everything they do.
We will see you in court, Mayor Papenfuse, because you may not inflict your illegal laws on the safety of my body.
The war on Christianity, at home and abroad
With all these “wars” going on, you know, against poverty, drugs, Liberalism’s war on individual rights and liberty, Hillary Clinton’s war on women, it is hard to find room for one more.
But yes, there is another war going on, and it is purposefully un-reported by the mainstream media, for evident political reasons.
That war is the war on Christianity, in America, Europe, and across the Middle East.
Despite being the bedrock of American values and institutions, American Christianity in all its variations somehow turned into a target, somewhere in the 1960s. Those versions of Christianity offered as an acceptable alternative were far-left politicized versions with no basis in Christian texts, with Jim Wallis a good example. The modern day Quakers are another good example, as they are as America-hating, pro-tyranny, pro-totalitarian as any far-Leftist could ever hope for. These became the “good Christians.”
It is practically illegal to be a professing, witnessing, practicing Christian today in America. If you stand up for your religious rights, as guaranteed by the US Constitution, you are immediately labeled as a racist, a bigot, a mean person, a threat to others, and so on. You might even get sued for refusing to violate your own rights.
A wedding cake, wedding photography is somehow more important than religious beliefs.
Somehow, being opposed to the PUBLIC SUBSIDY of private birth control became another reason to hate Christians. Do you recall Sandra Fluke, the young lady who demanded that the public taxpayer pay for her to avoid pregnancy? Why Sandra Fluke just could not engage in abstinence, engage in behavior that would not lead to pregnancy, or pay for her own birth control were all public policy questions to which lots of Christians had the common-sense answers.
But because they are Christians, their common-sense views were somehow unacceptable, an establishment of religion…yeah, right. Christians founded America and wrote the laws that protect minorities. It is the Biblically-inspired US Constitution that was designed to protect minorities. The worst faults of America’s Christians pale, pale, pale in comparison to the depredation, cruelties, mass murder and sadism practiced by “liberated” minds in Fascist and Communist countries, which is to say, most of the world.
Across the Middle East Christian refugees are increasingly fleeing their ancient homelands in the face of Islamic supremacism. To its credit, the mainstream media is slowly reporting an increasing number of insane incidents of “convert-or-die” experiences these believers face at the hands of their Muslim abusers. There are many more Christian refugees from Muslim lands than there were “Palestinian” refugees seventy years ago, but who do you hear about day-in, day-out?
In Europe, Christianity is all but dead, having been relegated to the shadows of cultural and political life, its own leaders having embraced their own demise as the ultimate symbol of self-sacrifice. Britain is home to Anglican leaders who openly endorse the use of Muslim Sharia Law in lieu of British law in some areas. That is, the supplanting of British law by Sharia law. Bizarrely, when Christians object to the removal of Christian-based law, in favor of Islamic law, they are accused of being bigots. Said another way, British Christians are being forced by their own leaders to accept the imposition of another religion, or face accusations of sticking up for their religion…
This is the “logic” of the Left, and it is utterly illogical. At best it is morally relative, if not morally bankrupt. For to give up equal protection under the law in favor of Sharia-approved brutal family honor killings of young women, even little girls, by fathers and family members, is to turn Western Civilization upside down.
This is why American Christians must rediscover their roots, rediscover their original texts, rediscover their traditional prayers, and simple values, and re-assert themselves politically. America is depending on Christians.
Western civilization was primarily built by Christians, and if they abandon it, the whole enterprise will come crumbling down.
Onward, Christian soldier.