WAR, What Is It Good For?,,,,Nothin'

I have wanted to write about a couple of things for a while but couldn’t decide how to start.  Finally I decided I would just jump in and see where it ended up.  Let’s talk about the “War on Drugs” which has obviously been a huge failure because there is a Walgreen’s Drug store on every corner with a CVS Pharmacy right across the street

First of all the name of the war was all wrong.  Instead of War on Drugs, it should have been “War on Drugs We Don’t Like” because there all kinds of drugs we do like. We love drugs like Alcohol, nicotine, Tylenol, Advil, percodan, vicodin , oxycotin and of course Viagra.  Viagra came out of another smaller lesser known skirmish known as the “Battle of Limp Dicks” but that’s another story. The drugs that the Government doesn’t like are cocaine, marijuana and heroin.

To have an all out war on something, you need to be a little more specific on what it is you are having this war about. Secondly, when you come up with a cute little catch phrase to carry your marketing campaign to the public, you need one that really nails down the seriousness of the problem, not one that totally demeans it like, “Just Say No.” How can anything be a really serious problem if all you have to do is “Just say No.”?

The other big war that has flopped is the “War on Poverty.”  One of the first and most important things we could have done and still haven’t done is pay people a living wage so they wouldn’t be in poverty.  But when the people who run the big corporations and their lap dogs in Congress who bow to their every whim are obsessed in scarcity; then it will never happen.   These people never have enough money, no matter how many billions they make every quarter; they don’t have enough to pay their employees a decent wage.  

I am surprised that they didn’t adopt the same lame motto of “Just Say No” since it worked so well with their drug war.  The real reason the “War on Poverty” hasn’t worked is because most of the politicians think that poor people are poor because they are lazy.  The right-wing nut jobs mantra is, “If they would just get out and get a job, they wouldn’t be poor”. Also the folks in power want to keep poor people poor because it keeps them from having the money or resources to make any significant changes to the status quo.


Bottom line is any time a politician declares war on anything; you can bet it will fail.   After all we haven’t won a war since 1945.




Stay tuned for future adventures.