The Beauty of Grey

After I posted on here yesterday, I checked the tally on visitors to my blog that I had installed around the time of my previous post, maybe a few weeks ago. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I had received sixty-something visitors (or at least, sixty-something views...I may have a stalker who reads my old posts three times a day or something), and I've had another half-dozen since yesterday. I had thoroughly anticipated being disappointed by what my hit counter would reveal, but I'm glad to see that (about to go all Sally Field here) you like me! You really, really like me! Or maybe it just means that y'all have a lot of free time on your hands, but that's cool, as long as you keep reading. In all seriousness though, I really do appreciate anybody who takes the time to read my blog, it makes it feel a lot more worthwhile. Now, if I could just get more of you to leave me some comments so I know who you are and what you think, I could thank you personally!

Here's something I thought about today that I don't think I've really discussed on here. Audrey and I were heading home from the store this afternoon, listening to 700 WLW because we're old people, I guess, and the hourly news comes on, and there's something about a seventeen-year-old somewhere in the area who was killed on the roads yesterday, and almost as an afterthought, the news guy mentions that alcohol was involved. I turned to Audrey and I said, "You know, you hear that a lot with those, that alcohol was involved. Have you ever heard them say that marijuana was involved?"

There are plenty of things that I'm ambivalent about, if not outright apathetic, but I'm a pretty aggressive advocate for the legalization of pot (and a lot of other drugs as well). I'm no pothead, mind you. I've done it maybe a couple dozen times in my life, most recently something like three or four years ago. I've never done anything heavier; I've never had train tracks, I've never danced with the devil in the white dress, I've never seen the pink elephant. However, I thoroughly believe that if that's what other people want to do, they ought to damn well be allowed to. What a person does in the privacy of their own home should not be subject to persecution by anybody else, and that's just the part of me arguing in favor of personal freedom. Then there's the part of me that says, look at the financial benefit that could be had by the United States if all, or at least some of those drugs were legalized. There's the revenue that would be provided by regulating the stuff for one, but more significantly, it would nearly slice the prison population in half! That's a whole bunch of people sitting in prison right now, eating up our tax dollars to keep them fed and clothed and in an 8x10 cell, not to mention covering their court costs. And what did they do? Nothing that hurt anybody but themselves, and in the case of marijuana, not even that! Of course, I'm talking here about drug users. They should still regulate the stuff for kids, just like they do with alcohol (not that it does a lot of good), and they should still go after people who sell it to kids, but we could still get a lot of otherwise harmless people out of our prisons and save ourselves millions, maybe billions of dollars, which we could then put towards educating the kids about the stuff, and let them make their own decisions. The kids today might not seem quite so stupid if we actually gave them some wiggle room instead of just telling them what's wrong and right. It's not the same for everybody. It's a grey area, but we are long past due to, as Ed Kowalczyk put it, appreciate the beauty of grey.