Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for October 30, 2010

I can see it coming. It’s like the “Bradley Effect”, lying racist white voters telling the pollsters they’re “cool”, and then flippin’ in the booth.

If Zonker moves back home, his parents are going to need all the legal mood altering substances they can get their hands on.

Parents are never all that thrilled when children move back in. Once children leave to live their lives we hope their lives will being them home for visits; but that they never will need to move back in. We want them to thrive on their own!

..I say start his patch in Honey Dew or Garbersville…

Ach du lieber! Sechstuppelspammerflaggen!

You might have gotten the early spammers as they are all gone, but I just got one posted 17 minutes ago. Sorry, all you folks that hate posters who brag they flagged, but just had to this time. By the way, have you missed me? Router trouble and no service for last ten days. This is new arc for me and don’t know what is going on.

It’s not racism or the generation gap that’s discouraging, but the spectacle of Zonk’s parents appealing to neighbors for help managing their son. “What have we done to deserve this?” they seem to ask. The answer is obvious, even to strangers who don’t care whether pot is legalized or not: these parents have never treated their child like a responsible adult, and now they want the laws to cope with him as they couldn’t.

A perverse way of acknowledging that your son has grown up: making him out to be a criminal so you don’t have to take him back into your home.

It seems that this is one of the first or actually THE first time we’ve seen Zonk’s ‘rents. Back in the Vietnam days he appeared on campus as the hippy foil to the Vietnam vet. Over the years he has continued the role. Now he is campaigning to end what has been a forty or fifty year study in frustration for the folks who want to control every aspect of our lives. Legalizing Mary is actually the only answer to ending what has been a long-term disaster.

I knew several good men who were crushed by the system in the late 60s and early 70s whose only “crime” was doing a little smoke. I also know several not so good men who carried booze in their canteens (we carried 4 or 5 and they had one with Old Dan) who were drunk enough to not be able to make good decisions when the time came for such things.

I would much rather have a pot-smoking child than what I saw the other day here in my neck of the woods: A twenty-nine year old on his dozenth or so drunk driving charge who had killed a couple of people in a head on crash while his was too drunk to walk so he drove.

You folks (you know who you are) who whine for limited gummint interference in your lives do not seem to mind the ultimate gummint interference when it suits your warped sense of justice.

@legacyshooter

Not having seen (as you have) the damage done by interdicting pot, I can’t speak for or against Prop 19. I have to rely on the judgment of those whom we’ve elected to enforce the law, from police chiefs to Attorney General Holder.

I can’t tell what you mean by “the ultimate gummint interference.” Busting somebody for using marijuana seems a far cry from executing a murderer or facilitating an abortion—-two necessary and appropriate examples, it seems to me, of “ultimate government interference.”

“When men do not live under a recognized power to keep them all in awe, they are in a condition of war—-war of every man against every other man … In such condition, there is no place for industry (because the fruits thereof are uncertain), no use of navigation or of imports, no building, no exploration (because leaving home is dangerous), no account of time (because no communal calendar), no arts, no letters, no society … but only that which is worst of all: continual fear and danger of violent death. And the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651)

If we lived in a perfect world we wouldn’t need a government, but we don’t. If our federal government would just do its job according to the Constitution with its very limiting powers we would not be in the mess we are in.

Any law that isn’t or can’t be enforced diminishes the credibility of law in general.

I’d have used quotes, but am not sure of exact wording. Heinlein, I think?

Zonker, it’s like the old saying…

“You can’t go home again”.