It’s an old saw that is worthless in an informed, compassionate, smart, humanistic, science-backed, social justice, systems thinking sort of world – “People are doing drugs cuz they wake up one morning and say, ‘Man, I want to screw up my life, take years off my physiology, wreck families, put my future in the hands of money changers, and virtually become a shell of myself, a zombie.’”
Step right up folks and see the greatest show on the planet. El Chapo is his name, and magic is his game. Is he saint or is he sinner? Watch in awe as this vertically challenged boy from Sinaloa transforms himself from lowly peasant to powerful prince before your very eyes. Gaze in amazement as El Chapo escapes daringly from not one, but two maximum security prisons, only to be captured and imprisoned once again.
It’s tempting to look at Baltimore and think that this is an urban event, impacting the lives and futures of relatively few who are relatively insignificant. It’s convenient to think of a ‘riot’ as breakdown of civil society, but civil society broke down long ago. The streets of Baltimore are the parallel to Reagan’s fantasy view of America. They reflect a reality that in spite of the effort to hide and marginalize it won’t go away. It proves that no matter how much we try to argue otherwise, our collective fate must honor all those who are part of it, not just the few.
