The Desperation of the Hillbilly

There is no look more desperate than the look on a Hillbilly's face as he drives into his favorite convenience store in the morning.
It's part fear, part pain, part panic. A haunted, hunted expression.
Today, I was walking across the parking lot of a convenience store when I saw the first wave of hillbillies. A convoy of beat-up trucks, SUVs, and vans belched into the parking lot. (If you incarcerated half of the drug-addled and drink-embalmed hillbillies, you would have carbon offsets to displace a decent industrial province in China. But, that's another post.)
I was nearly run over twice, but, I managed to make it to my vehicle for the second half of the parade.
Junker after junker zoomed in, catapulted into a parking space (or two), and, just when you thought for sure they were going to crash through glass doors, screeched to a halt.
I didn't feel safe enough to venture back across the lot to find out what the object of such an important mission could be, so I waited for them to exit the store.
Surely, it must be some kind of medicine. Maybe something for their offspring? Some sustenance so important that time was of the very essence.
No...
Coffee.
Carton of cigarettes.
Snuff.
These people were risking their lives (and mine) for this?
Next year, since we can't afford trips to Spain, as we're all working too hard to keep hillbillies in cigarettes and coffee, you're invited to the first ever Running of the Hillbillies, where you can test your manhood running across the store parking lot in the face of rampaging hillbillies.
Ah. Where's Hemingway when you need him.

War on Drugs=War on Poverty.

The War on Poverty can not be won without a successful war on drugs, and vice-versa.
That's an uncomfortable thought that doesn't appeal to my libertarian side.
And it doesn't sound cool at all. And being cool is more important than being right, just ask Hollywood.
But the truth is the truth, no matter how un-hip, how uncomfortable.
I came to this realization anecdotally and have yet to find any statistics... likely, because it's a dirty, bureaucratic secret that would be deemed too politically incorrect.
Again. Indulge me.
I talked to a few police officers who told me that, roughly, 80 percent of their calls are related to substance abuse. The crimes run the gamut... from mundane (drunk and disorderly) to the violent (assaults, rapes, murder). More importantly, these officers stated that an above average number of these calls originate in low-income and section 8 housing, despite, of course, that most residents do not live in such housing.

You can do your own studies to confirm this. Check out crime stories and the police log in your local paper. I did and the results were shocking. In a recent story on a drug bust, ALL the perps were housed in government-subsidized housing units, even though this was a multi-municipality drug bust.

Let's take it another step: more the number of poor who die from alcohol and drug abuse in a month exceeds the number of soldiers that die in Iraq in a year.
Wow.

Our great and noble WELFARE system is actually ENABLEMENT system. We are paying for people to do drugs. We're, sort of, back-office slave traders who finance the servitude of human beings. We don't want to be troubled with actually helping people; but, we don't want to feel guilty, either.
I'm sure that, right about now, the Welfare proponents would say that drug use is caused by the desperation of poverty.
To which: I respond, "So what?" I am not arguing cause. I am arguing the relationship between poverty and drug and alcohol abuse. Further, if poverty does indeed cause substance abuse; it certainly does not alleviate the desperation of poverty and, actually, exacerbates the pain and hopelessness.
The conclusion is inescapable: a welfare system that is genuinely interested in the welfare of able-bodied men and women must... MUST... ensure that the people avoid harm. Recipients of welfare should be randomly drug tested. And, I'll go further, should be tested for alcohol abuse, as well.
This, is a key element of turning Welfare society into a Betterment society.