'We mean business'
Billy Cox
Baby boomers — the generation claiming Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama — are deliberately killing themselves at rates that have startled the Centers for Disease Control. From 1999 to 2004, suicides among 45-to 54-year-olds spiked by 20 percent.
CDC’s prime suspect is the epidemic use/abuse of prescription drugs. But barring “psychological autopsies,” nobody can say for sure, exactly.
One thing we can count on: As the sheer volume of boomers crashes the Medicare and Social Security systems and insane federal drug policies bar them from legally accessing all options to relieve pain and suffering, we ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
Never mind that, in February, the American College of Physicians became the latest medical group to advocate removing cannabis from Schedule 1 drugs that include heroin and cocaine. With the world still awaiting documentation of the first fatal marijuana overdose, Big Pharma continues to buy off legislators to advance its own expensive psychoactive agendas. And those legislators continue to finance a $2.3 billion, 10,000-employee Potemkin Village called the Drug Enforcement Administration.
According to the FBI Uniform Crime Reports, more Americans were arrested for marijuana possession in 2006 (738,916) than for violent crimes (611,523). Which is one of the driving engines of our latest national disgrace — last month’s announcement by the Pew Center on the States that more than one in every 100 adult Americans is in prison or jail.
Aging baby boomers are only beginning to reap the harvests of America’s failure to have an adult conversation. But this imminent reckoning over the inevitable is only one of many policy issues that’s nowhere to be found in the Campaign '08 debates.
And still. Reliable as green spring shoots. Yet another indication in the belief of persistence, not matter how exotic or seemingly remote the issue:
This week came another e-mail blast from ufocasebook.com, encouraging voters to demand UFO positions from Obama, Clinton, and John McCain.. “Apathy will get us nothing,” stated the missive, “but if we all do something they will at least know we mean business plus they'll get the hint that this is an important issue for many American voters!”
They will at least know we mean business. Cripes, it sounds so Pollyanna. The children of The Greatest Generation are cracking up in an intentional swath of early funerals and the experts are mystified. De Void has a theory and it’s not so complicated. UFOs, drug laws, a culture of debt and fraud — it’s all the same: Nobody’s listening. To anything.
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