Posted on 12/06/2018 8:19:17 AM PST by SeekAndFind
It’s an old episode of The Twilight Zone: A woman sits in a hospital with her head heavily bandaged. A surgeon is warning her that this is his last attempt and that if this procedure of plastic surgery doesn’t take, there’s nothing else he can do. So far, we haven’t seen any of the faces of the other people. The surgeon begins to remove the bandages, and when he is done, he expresses shock: No change! The camera shows us a normal, indeed beautiful young woman, then pans to show us that everybody else is grotesquely misshapen. The young woman dissolves into tears as she is told that she’ll be sent to a reservation, where there are others of her kind.
Welcome to the modern world, and what it has made of Western civilization.
Well within my lifetime, the world has been turned upside down and twisted completely out of shape. When I was a teenager and a young adult, it was absolutely the norm that girls had it pounded into their heads to hold out for the marriage certificate, and boys, despite any lies told to their friends, generally respected that. The overwhelming majority did get married before they had any thought of having children, and there were no contraceptives to permit risk-free hanky-panky.
To modern ears in the sex-saturated 21st century, the above sounds at best quaint and old-fashioned. But there are those of us -- Orthodox Jews, seriously observant Christians, Muslims who reject the insane Jihadist cult, as well as adherents to customs of other traditional societies -- for which these are still standards held.
Yet if we express ourselves in public concerning those traditional values, we are met with hostility and ridicule. The deformed people around us who make up contemporary society want to shut us up. All that is missing is the compulsory reservation, where we can be with people just like ourselves.
Indeed, some of us put ourselves voluntarily in such a reservation. For the attempt, we are met with angry lawsuits -- restrictive zoning codes meant to prevent the building of synagogues which are within easy walking distance of people’s homes, or to prevent expansion of educational institutions to accommodate our burgeoning families. It is amazing how many people seem to be afraid of polite young men dressed in hats and jackets, or modestly dressed young women with children clinging to their skirts.
Once upon a time it was enough not to own a television set, because one had better things to do with one’s time. Now, it is increasingly dangerous to permit one’s children to go to a public library, because one never knows what sort of books they may come home with. We simply aren’t interested in having our kids read something like "Debbie Has Two Daddies"; unless there has been a horrible tragedy, most of our children have a mommy and a daddy, one each. In some Western countries, in which there is nothing like the First Amendment’s protection of freedom of religion, they are trying to shut down schools that teach values relying on Biblical morality -- to drive people like us out of their society, or force us to conform.
But for all this, it is increasingly evident that the misshapen, hideous people who are the new “norm” actually recognize, deep down, that there is something terribly wrong. You see, as the political leaders of our topsy-turvy society are now forced to admit, we have a drug problem.
To be sure, there were drug addicts when I was young, too -- but I didn’t know any of them. The incidence was sufficiently rare that when some jazz musician was busted for possession of a controlled substance, it made front page headlines. No longer, as the half-century old yet persistent cultural mantra of “sex, drugs, and rock and roll” makes quite clear. It’s out in the suburbs, and nobody wants to ask: Why? The government spends billions each year trying to reduce the supply of such substances, but there is no discussion about reducing the demand, and the reason is that the obvious answer is too painful to contemplate.
For those ugly, misshapen people -- who would put us in reservations, from where we cannot “offend” them -- are deliberately seeking anaesthesia to spare them the pain of their empty, meaningless, purposeless lives. It seems that sex, drugs, and rock and roll, still less the ever weirder forms and fetishes that some people try, do nothing to fill the aching void that they feel, but will not confront or contemplate. Universities have become centers of binge-drinking to the point of insensate intoxication, and there is an “opioid problem” -- which does not really mean pain killers, in the conventional sense, but substances like heroin and fentanyl -- in the suburbs where people have everything; everything in a materialistic sense, that is.
And more and more states want to legalize marijuana, another anaesthetic, which all of us know is a “gateway drug” to the harder stuff.
The general society wasn’t always this way, and it doesn’t have to be this way now, but dealing with the underlying problem before the general society collapses in on itself requires courage. It requires admitting that the currently common path that distorts people to make them ugly and misshapen is irredeemably wrong, and resolving to return to those core values of traditional, Biblical morality. Those values characterized the civil society that made possible the Constitutional order, the common birthright of every American.
I remember that british colonial days they got the ‘oriental subjects of the crown’ addicted to heroine, both for profit as well as for control (probably mostly for profit).
You can look inward at our social and moral ills and not be remiss, for an external supply side explanation, I wonder if it wouldn’t be bad to question if a little east/west karma isn’t taking place.
True that.
So you mean muslims who are not really muslims and do not follow the koran or hadith.
****
“Muslims who reject the insane Jihadist cult”
Author knows too little about this subject to be writing articles on it.
The source of our “opoid epidemic” are doctors’ prescriptions. These create the addicts. The fentanyl smuggling supplies the addicts who can’t get enough from the system or who got cut off.
The increasingly Kafkaesque-nightmare nature of modern life provides many with enough incentive to choose to take that path.
Asserting cannabis to be an anesthetic is pretty absurd also, and these aren’t the only items of complete nonsense in this article. This should never have seen print if a responsible reputation-preserving editor was on hand.
The causes of the opioid epidemic are the the very same as the crack cocaine epidemic.
And both are the result of dumb people making poor decisions.
Dumb people making poor decisions is an eternal constant.
What is new is the mass pushing of highly addictive psychoactive substances onto tens of millions of people under the guise of medicine.
“The source of our “opoid epidemic” are doctors’ prescriptions.”
You may as well blame the pharmacists for filling them.
The real culprits are the people who allow themselves to get addicted. It’s a choice, not a disease. Countless people have used opioids without getting addicted. They chose not to abuse them.
During the Tobacco Wars, we were warned by liberals that quitting smoking was as difficult as quitting heroin. Well, I quit smoking and it wasn’t that hard. So there....
“What is new is the mass pushing of highly addictive psychoactive substances onto tens of millions of people under the guise of medicine.”
People need to make better choices, have some self-control, and not become addicted to drugs.
It’s all rather simple for those who are intelligent and emotionally well equipped.
Yes, every addict ever is a dumb person.
You’re a real genius...
Your last sentence was the whole point of the writer’s article!
“Yes, every addict ever is a dumb person.”
The decision to do drugs and the decision to become addicted are choices, and they are poor choices.
Dumb people make bad choices.
“The source of our “opoid epidemic” are doctors’ prescriptions. These create the addicts. The fentanyl smuggling supplies the addicts who can’t get enough from the system or who got cut off.”
Hmmm, while there may be some substance to this claim, this smells an awful like the progressive standard “it’s someone else’s fault” meme.
A good many folks I know were prescribed opiods following painful surgery and virtually none of them finished the prescription. When the pain subsided (not gone, just subsided), they quit the drug.
Those who continued CHOSE to do so. In these cases, the doctors do share some responsibility, but then again, do we have free will or not?
Great article. Lots of truth in there. He covers all the (escape from life abuses) like drugs, alcohol but you could throw in sexual perversions as well. Children are at greater and greater risk from the perverts. And I agree the root cause is the departure from God and Biblical standards.
Then there’s the ever rising suicide rate which is the ultimate escape.
His Twilight Zone reference was perfect.
Doctor prescriptions are of course part of it. But he’s going to just one level deeper and finding out why so many people turn to dope and want a prescription. I would add him one other thing, when the GOP and Clinton gave us NAFTA and looted jobs from this country, there were a large population of people sitting around losing their minds in poverty. That adds up to drugs. Also one cannot ignore the very large role our intelligence agencies have had in this.
When I took Sociology 1000, homosexuality was deviant behavior. The only thing that has changed is the text books.
As I occasionally point out, ours is a society that has degenerated to the point that many people’s concept of freedom raises little higher than someone’s crotch. The same people who will lust for government to control every nuance of life also demand that sex, or anything that helps there be more sex without consequences (like abortion), is entirely off of the table.
At the start of the Republic most everything was generally lawful except for what was forbidden — like homosexual acts or adultery generally were — but now everything is unlawful unless it is explicitly allowed/regulated/licensed ... except for sex, a glaring exception.
Indeed, before the Left became so loose with the term it sometimes seemed that, at least in Leftist rhetoric of the 70s (can’t speak about the 60s, I was a bit too young then), “fascist” included anyone who dared suggest people be morally upright.
I take it you’re more of a checkers player than a chess player.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.