Some Days I Think It Might Be Simpler If I Started Smoking Crack

I'm guessing that by now everyone has seen the video of the pot smoking toddlers. I have only one question: why in the hell is everyone acting so shocked?

I'm going to guess it goes back to what I've said before about "mainstream" America being clueless about many things that go on and have been going on in this country for years. I'm thinking this new and improved media access might just blow the cover off of a lot of things, get ready for an eye-opening ride.

I'm in my mid-forties and I can go back 30 years and recall seeing toddlers smoking pot. The first time I saw it I was only about 13 myself and it was not teenagers giving it to them and for anyone who wants to delude themselves that this is an inner city, race-based phenomena...it was by the toddlers' white, adult parents. Truth is, every incident I ever saw of children being given marijuana involved white, adult parents. White, adult parents in small town America.

Excuse me for not getting very excited about teenagers doing this...teenagers across the board usually do not have real good judgement, m'kay?

Shame I don't have video of the time I saw an 18 month-old baby and his 6 year old sister running around a table that was covered with a scale and plastic baggies and a large quantity of methamphetamine. Shocking? Not really, it's a lot more common than middle America wants to know about.

The biggest difference is white people get away with it more often because law enforcement, courts and social services don't look at white people as hard. We can do shit and never get caught. When we are caught we are more likely to get off with lighter sentences or receive "treatment". I worked in the damned system for many years, I don't need any studies to tell me that.

The truth is that children living in drug infested environments are not usually difficult to spot. Most of the time everyone knows it, their teachers, neighbors, probably even the mailman but there is no realistic system in place to help them. Jailing their parents lands them in an overburdened foster care system and often subject to even worse abuse and neglect than they've already experienced because believe it or not, even drug-addicted parents with serious emotional problems usually love their children, foster parents don't.

Besides, if we did actually gather up all of these children they would number in the millions. That is the cold, hard fact.

If we compiled a list of the names of the children who have died while in foster care it would probably form a bridge all the way to England. That wouldn't even begin to touch the ones who lived but suffered emotional and sexual abuse.

So what to do? First off we need to wake up and acknowledge how prevalent this sort of thing is and quit acting like it's some kind of freaky "isolated incident". Take off the blinders people.

The rest is not as difficult as one might think. The welfare of our children will never improve until we improve the welfare of their parents. We just can't adopt them all out to Angelina and Madonna, we have to be there for the parents so they have the resources to be better parents. Or we can continue to ignore reality and do nothing except when some incident makes it onto our nightly newscast and allow generation after generation to continue in a downward spiral creating it's own version of America and then scream at our lawmakers to lock more people up when it impinges upon our way of life. At least until there aren't any more of "us" to scream about anything. That strategy has been working out really well for us hasn't it?

At what point is America going to begin to comprehend that targeted "social spending" is not a handout. Even leaving out humanitarian concerns and emotion, ignoring social issues like poverty and health care, mental health care and child care, etc. is just not a good business decision. In the long run it isn't cost effective and it costs us more to ignore than it would to address the problems.

How long could you operate a business if you did not supply your employees with the tools they needed to do their jobs? Not very long. So why is it that we seem to think that we can function as a society in any profitable way by not supplying our people with the tools they need to do their jobs?