Hypocrisy

By G. Patrick Callahan, Prisoner of War in America

Dave Perk, my sister Nora and I founded the November Coalition. While Nora and the rest of the outside squad are out there busting their behinds for all you (mostly) apathetic, beat down drug law violators, Dave and I sit here mulling over strategy. I call it Perkolating because Dave's pretty savvy and I'm no dummy myself, although I admit to a serious lapse of character judgement now and then. It was a close friend who testified against me at trial to save his hefty hide. Semper Fi, Glenn.

Excuse me, I digress... Anyway, Perk and I were discussing the incredible hypocrisy of the government's war on drugs, all those interesting, confusing little things like the government spending billions of dollars on drug interdiction along its borders when it simultaneously instituted the NAFTA accords, the North American Free Trade Agreement. In 1996, 2,400,000 trucks came in from Mexico and a scant 3% of them were inspected by Customs. So here we are, planes and radar balloons in the air, men in vehicles, boats and ships, hundreds trudging around afoot, allegedly to intercept drugs, yet there's a hole from San Diego, California to Brownsville, Texas. What's more, the Clinton Administration, that bastion of integrity, honesty and moral principle, knew that contraband would pour in unchecked (pun intended) and issued secret memos to Customs and DEA supervisors not to make it known to the public.

Soon the government will sign the Caribbean Free Trade Agreement and it will be an open pipeline of ships instead of trucks. Get the picture? Massive hypocrisy. It just doesn't add up.

As we were Perkolating, Dave says, "And think about the abortion issue. Just think about that!"

I didn't grasp it and replied, "You ain't making sense. I don't want to muddy our gripes with the abortion issue."

But Perk lined it out and it's really a stunner if you ponder it. The courts of this country, under the rubric of "personal choice," have legalized abortion. The thinking goes something like this: a woman should have control over her own body and have a right to do with it as she pleases. And then again, legalizing abortion keeps the back alley, black market abortionists from plying their trade: check those words- "black market" and "back alley." Sound familiar?

So abortion is regulated and licensed because women who want one will get it anyway, anyhow. It kills, however, millions upon millions of unborn children every year. They are salined out - where the baby is literally burned to death, often wailing the whole time - or they are sucked out, dismembered or pithed through the brain like frogs in biology 101. Let's face it, sports fans, no matter what you believe, abortion is a gruesome, life taking proposition. It is megadeath underwritten by the United States Supreme Court in the name of personal choice and it's just peachy keen because it is the law of the land.

But God help you if you have done a line of cocaine and fail a William Rehnquist-inspired urine test! God help you if you've been arrested for possession of a couple of bales of marijuana or a kilo of cocaine. God help you if a little D.A.R.E. block informer calls the cops because she saw you with a doobie. You can lose your freedom and your home over a gram of meth. You see, this government legalizes personal choice when it comes to taking the most innocent life there is-and by the freight car load-but no one has personal choice when it comes to consensual drug use...er, except for drugs like alcohol, nicotine and the prescription goodies utilized by the wealthy, like Valium.

And imagine how many times women have sat on juries, women who have destroyed their unborn, perhaps more than once, looking down their sanctimonious noses at some alleged marijuana or cocaine seller. She thinks to herself, "You no good, rotten doper - I'm going to find you guilty and I hope you die in prison!"

Imagine it. Imagine the hypocrisy.