by Colin Hyde
Hello there, fans of Tricia Fairweather! She’s touring in the mountains in Peru with her son Tavion and cousin Kareem, and at every stop Tricia goes to the café to get her dose of coca tea. I bet they drink coffee over there too, but you can’t go to Peru or Bolivia and choose café over the sensibly legal, energizing national drink, coca tea. You know that coca is what gave Coca Cola its start, why people had to reach for that Coke again and again. I say, we could all be sipping coca tea, if Tricia gave up teaching math and became an entrepreneur.
I’ve said that at no time am I more spiritual than when I have a few drinks in me, a few. I know I am not alone. Okay, there are people who get their little whatever from the weed. You know the little adage, a little bit of everything is good. What concerns all sane people is excess, the bad things that happen to those who were born minus a shut-off button.
In an unreasoned attempt to make the shut-off button redundant, the anti-alcohol crowd in the US came up with the absurdity called Prohibition. In as many states as they could, they got their government to stomp down alcohol. Of course they failed. We have heard of scientists who set out in search of a remedy for one thing and arrived at a remedy for something entirely different. The prohibitionists’ “success” was the cultivation of conditions that handed over the field to philistines who engaged in murder-for-hire and corrupting police and politicians.
Some people head really haad. It is the most difficult thing to make them understand that it is destructive to keep weed-smoking illegal. They think that because they have a good heart their solution is the best. We’ll have to insist on it: it doesn’t follow that if someone loves you, they are good for you. Anyway, no one is questioning the love of people who promote say NO to weed. The problem is the big stick they drop on people who don’t or can’t say NO.
Ms. Bartelt said maybe we need compassion, and no criminalization
Hopefully, Karen Wallace Bartelt’s difficult story in HuffPost, “My Son Died Of A Fentanyl Overdose. Here’s What No One Is Telling You About This Crisis”, opens some unseeing eyes. The grieving mother, at the prompting of some friends, started teaching creative writing to people who had been living on the streets. She said “the class was a revolving door. The pull of drugs drew many of my students back to the streets. I lasted a year. My quest brought very temporary relief to a very few instead of enacting one iota of change.”
Bartelt said that not all of the addicts came through tough environments, and that her son “had absolutely everything to live for … but he shared one thing in common with my students: Once drugs were introduced into his life, there was nothing that his family – nine times in rehab, house arrest, or a bright future – could do to loosen the grasp of heroin and fentanyl.”
Bartelt said hundreds of thousands of children (youth) have died from drug overdoses that are “more powerful than the human body is built to withstand”, and noted that “stronger drugs are in the pipeline.” As to what is to be done, she said: “Throwing money at the problem hasn’t worked, and neither has incarcerating addicts or counting on them to hit rock bottom.” She said “The pill farms and cartels seem way beyond the reach of any government officials.”
Bartelt said, “Maybe we need to trade compassion for character lectures. Maybe we treat the addict as a patient instead of a criminal. Maybe we give credence to a recent study that identified inherited genes with direct links to addiction disorders, instead of blaming them merely on bad parenting.”
I don’t have all the answers either, but at the risk of being insulting, I say these anti-druggists have to be crazy to insist on prohibition, for that was a disaster yesterday, is a disaster today, and will be a disaster tomorrow if we persist in it. All that prohibition does is hand the keys to people who don’t mind being afoul of the law.
My Olympics viewing
The number of must-watch sporting events that preceded the Olympics must have the organizers of the Games feeling like the moon in Lewis Carroll’s The Walrus and the Carpenter who complained about the sun cutting into her hours. Whew, the majority of sports aficionados around the world must need a breather. It seems like just in the last month we had the Euros and the Copa America, the British Open and Wimbledon. And cycling lovers had the Tour de France.
The Olympics could bore me if I wasn’t selective. There are all these garbage sports in the show, such as male football, male basketball, lawn tennis, golf, and baseball. They have their own games. If you prefer to win in another arena, you shouldn’t be at the Olympics.
The worst sport at the Olympics is basketball. They will get zero of my eye time. I won’t watch even if France is about to beat the USA. It was fun when the US took only college players. But after they got whipped by the USSR, they complained that many of the Soviets were senior guys playing in senior leagues. You understand their pain there, but the prize in basketball is the NBA title. These American players are tired, and they’re in their off season. Of course they don’t want to lose, but their passion is artificial. Win, lose, or draw, they should have stayed with their college players.
Well ha, ha, just before sending in my piece (around 7:00 a.m. Monday) I read an international headline that screamed that US coach Kerr was “crazy” because in their first game he gave zero minutes to star player Tatum. Don’t be duped, nobody’s watching their boring basketball, so they want to draw people in with controversy. Give your eyes to sports whose showcase is these two weeks every four years.
You won’t see any professional boxers at the Olympics, and that’s because they know their ring. I’ll watch boxing. I’ll watch wrestling and nobody will tell me it’s gay. I used to like wrestling because I loved testing my strength against other fellows but didn’t want to punch anybody, for fear I would hurt them badly, and I didn’t want anybody to punch me, for fear they would make me become violent, or, ehm, knock me out.
Thank gudnis for steroids, for keeping bodybuilding from the Olympics. That decision’s in an expert report. Tanushree Bhowmick, in the story “Why is bodybuilding not an Olympic sport yet?”, said “the IOC does not recognize bodybuilding as an Olympic sport, because firstly, this athletic endeavor needs steroids, which are strictly prohibited in the Olympics.”
The marquee events at the Olympics are gymnastics, weightlifting, and track & field. These talents are foundational, gymnastics for agility, weightlifting for strength, and track & field for speed and endurance. For most of the gymnastics events my eyes will be glued to the television, but when they get on the balance beam I’ll be looking through one eye, peeking, like when a bad shark shows up near a defenseless swimmer. That balance beam makes me very nervous. How these weightlifters don’t blow out their backs, I don’t know. They are nervous time for me too. Of course, the event of events at the Olympics is track & field. Wisely, the organizers always save the best for last.
Ehm, G Mike had in mind, Clement!
My, my, no one has directly mentioned Clement’s tremendous contribution to all this volleyball ecstasy. Lupita got her praises, the present coach got his accolades, and the girls got their parade and their names will be popular in the baby section painted pink at KHMH. But Clement, the father of volleyball, no one remembers him, maybe because in his time volleyball was no greater on the popularity bar than ping pong. Ah, G Mike hinted, and maybe he didn’t call name on the XTV WuB because of the national policy set by Diki Bradley.
You know that Clement was bullied. His dad was a great basketball star, and his brother Marion was a big star too, but Clement played volleyball, and in the old days boys did not play that. How he and his friends got to play is a story of the worst nepotism. It’s the Father of the Nation who gave volleyball license to monopolize space at the Civic Center for their sport. Now I’ll show you how one thing follows the next. So few boys played volleyball they had to import girls to complete their teams. Wala, the stone that was just complementary da now wi biggest stars. It all started with Clement. And the nepotism.
Okay, I take your advice again, and abruptly end this piece.