My posting remains lackluster, and in an effort to inspire myself, I have broken down and decided to find, of all things A THEME (gasp). In taking the advice of, well, everyone ever, I’ll continue to write what I know (also because my attempts at writing anything else turn out rather dreadfully).

My theme is generally “getting by in america”. This morning I was listening to Barbara Kingsolver on The Ethics of Eating. I have been a fan of Kingsolver’s since I read The Bean Trees in middle school, and one of her essays “Lily’s Chickens” has inspired me in many of the ways I have chosen to live my life over the past few years. The interview I was listening to elaborated on the essay; Kingsolver recently wrote a book about the year she spent with her family living primarily off of food they grew and harvested themselves.

I long for a life in which I can sustain myself and remain a member of a small and closely knit community. My dreams are simple, a house, a family, and some land on which I can grow my own food. Why does my dream feel so desperately unattainable? Well, for starters, I live in a country where a significant amount of the population will inexplicably (to me) vote for a man who believes that people who make less than $5 million a year are middle class.

I make a little less than twice the minimum wage, and I have no children. I live in a city with overwhelming poverty, and yet some of the highest rental rates in the country.

So this is my new blog. Maybe someone out there is interested in the challenges of getting by in America (the success of Nickel and Dimed indicates that someone must find the topic compelling), while remaining thoughtful, and without becoming whiney. Perhaps some people out there can relate, and hopefully some people out there have tips.

As I was writing my libertarian edged post yesterday I found myself going off on a tangent about the drug war. Realizing that my understanding was too incomplete to make an educated argument, I “put a dash in it” (as one of my college professors used to say about discussions he wanted us to move away from) and endeavored to do some further research. To that end, I found the following publication of the US DEA. Now, here I’m sure you’re thinking “a liberal young adult from Colorado, who went to a small liberal arts ‘hippie’ college, I don’t even have to wonder about her stance on drug legalization”. And mostly you would be right. But believe me, it isn’t because I hope to be able to drop acid on the street corner (legally).

I still don’t feel like I know enough about the legalization debate to post a well informed opinion (or frankly even to hold a well informed opinion). What I do know is that the DEA makes an awful lot of claims in the above-linked publication, and they don’t seem to provide any sort of evidence to support themselves. Now, even at my liberal arts, hippie college we learned “because I said so” isn’t actually a valid piece of support for any sort of claim. In fact, I don’t even think “because we’re the motherfucking DEA” holds much water.
I expect that the DEA actually has plenty of empirical evidence to support all of the claims the posit throughout “Speaking Out Against Drug Legalization”. And yet… they don’t provide a reference to any of it. Take for instance “Fact” Number 4, which references studies by the The National Cancer Institute, and the Institute of Medicine. They make no reference to the name of the study, nor the year in which it was conducted or published (timeliness of context, anyone?) All I’m saying is, if the information is there, why not make it easy for us to look at it? You can bet the other side is doing it. In fact, it only took about 15 seconds on NORML’s website to find a page with links to the actual articles they were referencing (or in some cases to internal articles that contained outside links).

But hey, they’re the motherfucking DEA. They have guns, and they’re the ones asking the questions here buster.

For the record… it’s somewhat amusing to think about how many wonderful watch lists I’ve had myself put on in the last 24 hours while doing some of this research.