I was possessing heroin in fairly large quantities in New York City during the years of the draconian Rockefeller Drug Laws. Had I been busted, I would have faced mandatory life in prison. I don’t think many white kids walked, either. I knew one who got 15 years for pot.
I once found myself driving, smoking a cigar, taking notes, and talking on the phone at the same time. I only became completely aware of this when I had to shift, and realized something had to give.
I think there are a good many Donald Trump voters who are sick of government as it is practiced in America and genuinely want to blow up the system and see what happens. They are stupid – or at least unwise – but not necessarily racist.
I very much believe in the Intentional Fallacy. If Donald Trump lies and dopes and bumbles and staggers his way into peace in the middle east, he gets credit for it. He owns it.
You know, I am not a particular Kennedy apologist or an awed fan – I was 12 when he was murdered – but I have discussed Kennedy with historians. For his incredibly short tenure, he was a very important president.
Donald Trump is way worse than George W. Bush. George W. Bush is a fundamentally decent man of limited intelligence who surrounded himself with awful people who dragged him in terrible directions. He was a bad president.
I don’t think there is prejudice against atheists the same way there is prejudice against fat people. I don’t think people hate or contemn atheists; I think people feel sorry for atheists.
I think Trump wants to be dictator. I don’t think the courts will allow him to be, and I think that after months of revolting sycophancy, neither will Congress. He will sink to such a popularity trough that even those spineless, craven gophers will cave.
But this does me no good because, being intelligent and sophisticated human beings, they are all contemptuous of Trump. They hate him. They find him…vulgar.
My preference would have been a school that was totally diverse – half and half, or close. I wouldn’t have hesitated at all if they would have been in the racial minority. But to be the only white kids: I don’t think that would have been fair to them.
So, when this kind of thing happens to other people, we need to put them in a different category from us. We don’t want to resemble them, and the fact that we might is too terrifying to deal with. So, they have to be monsters.
