In the Era When Conservatives Take Responsibility for Nothing
Trump declared trade wars on Canada and Mexico because Americans have an insatiable appetite for drugs.
In response to Trump’s ludicrous trade war, the sane and honorable president of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, gave a speech of historic proportions Trump could never make. Sheinbaum asked the most obvious question of all. In asking this question, she explained to the world Trump’s whole twisted rationale for punishing our closest allies. Why does Trump focus all the blame on Mexico, Canada, and China for our nation’s fentanyl crisis but not the insatiable appetite Americans have for illicit drugs?
I have long asked this question. What is so wrong with our society that people can’t spend more time in reality and prefer to be lost in some altered, twisted, barely coherent state? My brother died from a fentanyl overdose when he was 32. From the time he was 13 or so, he began experimenting with pot. Pot quickly became ecstasy. Ecstasy eventually became opioids, and then, when they became too expensive and less accessible, heroin. The dealer, who still lives not far from where my brother died, who sold him the fentanyl, told my brother’s girlfriend he didn’t know it wasn’t just heroin. She overdosed four months later.
Blaming Canada and Mexico, however, is a very typical reaction from modern conservatives. The era when a “man” took responsibility for his actions ended with conservatives sometime shortly after the whining, morally challenged Newt Gingrich came to power. The philandering Gingrich went after Clinton for infidelities, and the drug-addicted Rush Limbaugh blamed drug addicts for the country’s problems.
The right immediately went into excuse mode when we learned of their transgressions. It hasn’t stopped since. 9/11 wasn’t Bush’s fault, who had been president for 9 months, but Clinton’s fault. Everything that happens in the world, thanks to the policies and “leadership” of Republicans, is never their fault but always the fault of someone else. That “narrative” has become the guiding one now for Trumpists and Republicans in their personal lives. The minister didn’t rape the underaged girl; he was led astray by the culture of porn supported by Democrats, and now God Bless him, he is repenting.
It’s all bullshit. And the chief excuse-maker, liar, and despicable human who never takes responsibility for anything is 34-times felon, Donald Trump. They say a country’s democracy can be judged by how it treats its prisoners. A democracy and a people can also be judged by the kind of president we have chosen — a second time.
So, what is it about American society that feeds our ravenous hunger for drugs? Americans will ingest, snort, shoot, drink, smoke, rub on, and eat anything that blurs their perception of the reality claimed by so many as the greatest country on Earth. The rest of the world also struggles with drugs, but nowhere near the way the United States does. Something is seriously wrong with our society that so many people want to escape — and no, a glass of wine or a beer or two is equivalent to smoking a joint or shooting bath salts. Marijuana today is so potent that it completely debilitates people.
Pax Americana pushes the notion that life should be lived with the pursuit of maximum consumption, leaving people empty and lost. When you realize that everything you do in your waking hours is to earn money to buy something, and then upon buying that thing, you find you are emptier than before obtaining it, many people fall on the crutch of drugs to ease the bleakness of the nothingness overcoming them.
Conservatives can blame whomever they want. Trump can put up as many tariffs as he likes. However, fentanyl and other drugs will still be consumed in ungodly volumes by a nation of people who find the “greatest society on the Earth” empty and even a little miserable.
Is America empty and miserable? Of course not! And this is the thing that makes those not living there scratch their heads in disbelief and ask: What the f*** has happened to the United States of America? Could it be the fluoride in the water?