We Are At War with Ourselves, and Not in a Good Way

I don't like tobacco smoke. It makes me sick. I complain under my breath when someone near me lights up. But I do not pull out a gun to threaten him over it, and I don't go shooting people over it.

I could almost justify myself in doing so. It can make me that sick, sick enough that I can't function, can't think straight, can't stay awake, have trouble getting where I'm going on the train, can't work and put food on the table. (Tobacco smoke was the cause of my losing at least three good jobs, and losing those jobs is part of why I have trouble getting a good job now.)

If I thought it would solve problems, I could almost justify myself.

Instead, I try physically moving myself away from the smoke, or asking the smoker(s), politely, to respect my health if I can't move away. They usually do, these days.

There was a time some would complain, what about their right to smoke? But understanding is much more common now.

Truth about tobacco is winning out. It takes time, and reasoned discussion, and experiments and such, but truth is winning out.

Alcohol has similar issues, but social expectations have shifted.

Japan, for instance, has come from being a world where drinking was quite literally required of most people, to a world in which not drinking is recognized as a reasoned option. Twenty years ago, the social expectations practically required you to participate in office parties and meetings held in bars where, if you wanted to succeed, if you wanted to move ahead in the office, you had to participate in the drinking.

That still exists to a certain extent. It's hard for a new employee to work out his or her place in the pecking order without filling the boss's glass. If the smell itself undoes you, makes it hard to process what's happening around you, you can be at a disadvantage. And you do still stick out.

But the boss now recognizes that abstaining from alcohol is a reasoned and reasonable decision. And many co-workers do, as well, so that the soreheads (Sorry, but that's the most polite way to put it.) who complain about the non-comformist realize that they are putting themselves outside the pale of conformism when they complain about alcohol.

Alcohol is beginning to be recognized as the recreational drug it is.

Japanese society is beginning to discover ways to help each other to natural highs, natural ways to encourage each other, that don't involve fueling the high with drugs.

Beginning.

Prohibition, the way we tried it a hundred years ago in the US, was fuel for organized crime. Abondoning it the way we did back then was also a bad move. It caused violence both ways.

But the truth about alcohol is winning out now, to a large extent, because those who abstain are patiently discussing the problems with those who don't.

We have come to the point where a person can reasonably expect to be able to work in a tobacco-free environment, not by going to war over it, but by talking about it and admitting, socially, that it isn't nice to force others to smoke second hand.

We have come to the point where a person can hope to expect to be able to work on equal footing without having to indulge in beer, wine, whiskey, etc.

I grew up in a town in west Texas that was known at times as the murder capital of the US, and sometimes even the world.

The majority of people worked in the oilfield, and got together for beer to unwind after 72 hour (average) workweeks. It also happened to be on one of the main illicit drug supply routes from Mexico to Chicago and New York.

It was a violent town in many ways. People died on the job if the team was not clicking, and they died in the bars if arguments flared. And they died on the highway, in drug cartel wars.

We did not have KKK issues. The Klan was not approved in general, although there were some soreheads who complained about race instead of other reasons life was hard.

We did have racism in the town. There was an apartheid-like approach that put a lot of effort into getting funding and other help for the south-side schools. But there was separation.

Blacks were welcome in the northside school if they played sports well. Sometimes academically excellent blacks were recognized and got help.

When the courts said it was not enough and closed the south-side high school, resulting in busing students to the central and north-side high schools, there was grumbling, but there were no hangings.

The racial mix in residential areas has improved a lot in the forty-plus years since. There are still huge problems, especially related to football. (Great game, but we still go overboard with it, and good players often don't get the help they need to get balanced academic guidance.)

The town is a much less violent town now, but not because guns were banned. Guns were not the problem, they were just one of the ways the violence expressed itself.

This is what we need to talk about, rather than gun control, and rather than war on drugs. We need to work on solving the root problems.

We have to find a better way than trying to kill or otherwise force the other guy down, when we need a little relief from the stress of living in this world.

We need to quit living in an us-versus-them world.

(Started this about a year ago, when the shootings in the US began to become commonplace. Reminds me a little of the town where I grew up.) 

(And I need to write another post about how no true believer in the right to keep and bear arms is going to be putting his or her weapons on public display at inappropriate places like the discount store, much less spraying bullets around in public places where people die from the explosive expression of violence. But these kinds of posts take time to write reasonably clearly.)

[JMR201909021248: I ranted a bit more, but a bit less cogently on this topic after the late August shootings in and around Odessa: https://reiisi.blogspot.com/2019/09/war-and-where-i-grew-up-west-texas.html.]