Your solution is to let things get so bad that a bloody revolution is necessary, instead of using civil disobedience until the idiocy is apparent and the politicos are forced to change the law? 
Posted on 07/09/2002 12:48:48 AM PDT by Alan Chapman
Trever Palmer, 17, says he felt nervous and slightly heroic the night he picked up the phone, dialed 911 and informed the King County Sheriff's Office that his father was growing marijuana.
Minutes later, when Aaron Palmer, a Covington computer programmer, returned home from an evening of swimming laps at the local pool, deputies arrested him. They later found more than a dozen marijuana plants growing in a hidden room in the garage and booked the single father of three into the King County Jail on drug charges.
Two months later, as Trever Palmer prepares for his last year of high school, the 140-pound wrestler is still grappling with the consequences of his actions and talked about them in an interview yesterday.
Although police lauded him for doing the right thing, he says half his relatives are mad at him. He's "found out who my friends really are" while trying to avoid Kentwood High School classmates who scorned him, calling him "a weasel" and names much worse than that.
Palmer made the 911 call largely because of a lesson he learned in a Junior ROTC ethics course: "Stand up for what you believe in, don't follow the crowd and be your own person."
He still thinks he did the right thing.
"I felt like I was saving my sister and brother from this guy," he said. "You can only put up with so much."
But his family is torn apart, and his 15-year-old sister may not see the 911 call as such a brave act.
The night her father was taken away, "she really didn't speak much to me," Palmer said. "She was crying and trying to get her stuff together."
Today, she "just kind of avoids me," he said.
Palmer said his 7-year-old brother didn't know what was going on.
Palmer, who is spending part of the summer with his grandparents in Pennsylvania, plans to live with his best friend's family until he graduates and joins the Air Force. His sister and brother are staying with a cousin. Their mother, who is divorced from their father, is unemployed and "doesn't have room for them in her apartment," Palmer said.
Palmer's sister could not be reached last night, and Palmer's father did not return phone calls. Aaron Palmer, 38, was released on $5,000 bail shortly after his arrest and pleaded not guilty last week to a felony charge of drug manufacturing, the South County Journal reported. He faces up to five years in prison.
The boy said many of his relatives can't comprehend his motives for calling police.
"It sucks," Palmer said last night. "I was really hoping that they would understand. It's kind of like that hole in (me) that needs to be filled."
He has tried to explain himself to his father's parents, who "kind of understand, but they are upset."
When he called police, he said, he wasn't considering what would happen to his family. "I kind of figured that would fall into place."
What went through his mind?
"I thought: no guts, no glory," he said.
He thought marijuana growing was taking over his father's life. Instead of spending time doing things with the family, his father tended to his plants -- moving the pots around and watering. He said that on two occasions, people visited the house on account of the marijuana.
Living around drugs is "the part that no kid should have to go through, and I didn't want (my younger brother) to go through it."
There were other conflicts. He thought his father paid attention to his sister's accomplishments, while ignoring his own. And he thought his ROTC courses, which were based on Marine Corps leadership training, put him at odds with his ex-Army father "on different military perspectives."
The "stand-up" message from his ROTC course echoed in his head.
"That set it straight, why I should do it," Palmer said. "For one thing, it's illegal."
He said another factor was the emotions stirred by reading "The Red Badge of Courage" for an English class. He said he was impressed by how a character in the book, a soldier named Nick, discovered his own bravery.
"He stood up for what he believed in," Palmer said.
Your solution is to let things get so bad that a bloody revolution is necessary, instead of using civil disobedience until the idiocy is apparent and the politicos are forced to change the law?
imperfect parents who love their kids are far better people to have in control of the kids than foster homes;
It's as jesus said, 'let he who is without sin throw the first stone'. What parent is perfect? This guy provided nicely for his family, how do we know he was a pothead just because he smoked pot. He was at the gym swimming in the evening, he was at work earning good money in the day, a real pothead doesn't do those things.
There were other conflicts. He thought his father paid attention to his sister's accomplishments, while ignoring his own.
Do you have children?
Amen to that. I agree 100%.
So you wouldn't turn them in to the cops for drinking beer behind the garage?
No. It is the same thing. Drugs and guns are both brought under the federal cover by article 1, section 8, clause 3. Guns are protected under the federal constitutional provision and it took a federal constitutional provision to prohibit another drug, alcohol.
We will never be free to harm another. We will always be free to harm ourselves. If the latter is prohibited, then oppression can only be the outcome because that opens the floodgates of precedent. We see it expanded to tobacco, now expanding to include foods and vehicles.
My solution is to eradicate all drug laws and scheduling practices from the federal level and let each state handle it. The voters? The voters did not decide that both guns and drugs were an issue of interstate commerce.
What's your problem with cannabis use, anyway? Harmful impact on society, calling police powers into play? I have 65 pages of government funded and independent research that says that's bullbutter. Cannabis use is "immoral"? In what way? Please be clear and specific. Give evidence (objective, agendaless studies, not "statistics") to support your conclusions.
Civilizations and democracies fail because of a lack of integrity in the citizens. They do not fail because of a lack of respect for the law. There is a time and a place for disrespect of the law.
In nazi germany the government encouraged both the kids to turn in their parents when they merely said anti-nazi things in the home and they encouraged parents to take their mentally retarded or otherwise handi-capped children to the doctor for euthenasia. Both kids turned their parents in sentencing them to harsh punishment and parents brought their own children to the doctor for the purpose of having them killed. These kids and these parents were following the law, doing exactly what the in fact elected authorities asked them to do, but they were doing the wrong thing.
We need to encourage our children to have love for truth and respect for their parents. The very last line of the old testament shows us that it is the way of our creator to turn the hearts of the children towards their parents and to turn the hearts of the parents towards their children. As public schools all over america openly instruct children that it is OK to call 911 and turn in mom and dad these schools are violating the basic tenents that we have considered truth for thousands of years. It is this tendency that is far more likely to cause destruction to us as a people than a little bit of disrespect for laws.
After all, every cop I ever saw driving a police car went over the speed limit. Is our civilization going to falter because of that?
That's a pretty big assumption.
We were talking about the merits of a cild turning the source of his coverture into prison. You were all for it, to the detriment of all concerned, including society, and in implied support of the growing mass of precedent to further personally regulate the people of this country.
Use the established system? $275,000 to $1.3 million to get a case up through the courts (and that's only actual lawyer's fees). So, why don't we get a second job and pool our money with people of a similar interest, yeah baby.
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