Category Archives: culture
“Starving”
We’re all hungry for something more
And not just enough jumbo-sized pizza
Or calorie-rich milkshake from McDonald’s
Or another side of cheese-and-bacon fries.
But instead for the light at the end of the tunnel
That was foreclosed in the recession,
for the fingertips that brush our hair back
When we fall asleep in the passenger’s seat,
and for the words no one ever says
That could disrupt the void of silence
Fill the aching pit our stomachs reveal
When we realize we want something else, something more.
They say the whole country’s obese,
So the question is:
For what are we so desperately starving?
Adventure, Socialism, the Embargo, and Salsa: The Basics of My Recent Cuba Trip
A view of the Capitol building
To attempt to convey what I learned and experienced in the past few weeks would make my head explode, maybe yours as well, so I want to keep this post basic. I returned yesterday from Cuba, where I stayed for most of my days in La Habana, though I visited also Cienfeugos, Trinidad, and Santa Clara. Naturally, I must get the obvious out of way:
Yes, it was difficult to get there, and we needed special student visas.
Yes, Cuba is a very poor country, but the people and culture are immensely rich, and these people deserve a lot more of our attention. Most Americans, when thinking of Cuba, think only of Fidel Castro and the vague term of “Communism,” but Cuba might not be as foreign as we pretend, the people sharing some of the same intense passions as us (like baseball, rap music, and good beer).
Yes, the rum and cigars in Cuba were superb. If you go to Cuba and don’t try the rum and cigars, then what were the doing the entire time?
More importantly, however, are the questions that United Staters don’t ask when I tell them I just returned from Cuba. On its surface, its a land of bad gas mileage, a land of salsa, a land of making out in public. But the people transcend those stereotypes, like all people, expressing a deep love for each other. Most of Cuba’s population suffers from crippling poverty, and most don’t have cell phones or access to the internet because of this, but it brings people closer. They must build communities in a way most United Staters cannot.
Then comes other misinterpretations, like the inane idea that these people suffer because of the evils of “Communism.” Certainly not. They suffer because of the United States reaction to their socialist revolution, and they suffer because of their own government’s stubbornness to compromise their ideologies with neo-liberal policies. But when you see the track record for US corporations or IMF implementations in Latin American countries, who can blame Cuba for holding out from joining the system? (See: Bolivia, Venezuela, Chile)
The embargo certainly affects more than just Cuban-US relations which could be quite healthy if we did not cling to Cold War ideals and fears. We sanction other countries for even attempting to trade with our island neighbor, and this creates an isolated economy, struggling to reform but still adamant to resist joining the current world system. My opinion of this has change drastically.
What anyone must understand is that despite the poverty and the deteriorating buildings and smog choking Havana’s air, the people persevere. Each day, they find ways to survive, no matter how destitute or desperate the means. Some drive taxis, others sell rejected cigars to unknowing tourists; some go to university, but far more drop out of school to prostitute themselves in the streets, even kids as young as 13 or 14. And our self-made-man society, our American Dream culture, may scoff at that, call them lazy, call them whatever we like, but in the end, we’re the ones hurting them.
I will write more about Cuba in the following months, but I felt compelled to depict at least this much about it. What I’ve written in no way captures Cuban culture, and definitely, my experience could not capture the totality of Cuban culture. Even if I visited for a year, I doubt I could truly understand unless I had lived there, but that doesn’t stop me from trying to understand, from trying to understand. So, first, what must be said about Cuba is that our policies toward them are antiquated and, in the light of our relations with China, highly ridiculous.
I encourage anyone even slightly interested to study Cuban history and our relationship with them, and I challenge you to learn with an open mind and heart and to not emerge from this study disillusioned and indignant.
A view of the Melacon and of the Havana skyline in the distance.
The trip include adventure, swimming in mountain pools under water falls, lunching with a German diplomat, studying museums, singing at the top of my lungs at the Melacon (Sea Wall), learning to salsa, going to concerts, meeting locals, and staying up till 6 am with philosophers discussing life. But despite the experience, I learned some practical things, things that will affect me and things I hope to fully believe six months from now. Though I learned hundreds of things, perhaps the most important lesson was the following idea, something simply conceived and so simply true I’m not sure why I had not considered it critically before.
The privileged of the world have the full power and ability to alleviate the suffering of the underprivileged, but only if they choose to surrender the comfort of privilege. Therefore, the only real choice anyone must make is whether to live for others or to live for oneself. Once that choice is made, the others come easy.
Submerged: Part Four
2156
I clawed through the water, sinking only ten feet beneath the surface before crawling back up from air. Gasp. A wave sprayed my face with stinging flecks of water. “Ethan!” No sign of a head bobbing above the surface, only a black expanse constantly displaced. “Ethan, where are you?” But he couldn’t hear me, even if he swam twenty feet away, because the wind howled, the waves crashed against each other like war chariots, and my mouth filled again and again with salty water. “Ethan!”
Turning my head, thrashing through the water, I searched for anything. A sign. Where was the boat? I spotted it rising on the crest of a wave that had pushed it three hundred feet in the opposite direction. I furiously swam for the boat, wind-milling my arms, pushing through the black though the tide sucked me away from underneath. Another wave washed over my head, and I spun, clutching for something, anything. Climbing for air, reaching for the thin, drizzling light. But I couldn’t find the surface, I felt so disoriented, like someone had hung by upside down by my toes and beat me like a piñata.
A hand clasped around mine.
*
The city rose up to swallow me, and through the ruins under the sea, I could imagine the city as it once had been. There, that strip had been an old market, where tourists bustled past each other to buy straw-woven baskets. A great grass square I passed on my days off, before a saw sliced off my hand. Young people, still delusional with visions of grandeur, rested without anxiety beneath the warm sun, rocking in hammocks, or sunbathing on beach towels.
There– there had been some sort of old prison there, a dark creepy place they said was haunted. Always stories about haunting, though in a way the city had become just another ghost story.
Floating high above, I could see everything. The whole history splayed out, the myths of a thousand ghosts floating in an underwater dream. The green glare of the past pulsated to the surface, the houses rebuilding themselves, then crumbling. In my dream, I could see the birth and death of a city, and it seemed now, like the life of any person, nothing significant.
*
He slapped my face with the back of his hand, then pressed his clammy hands to my throat. Still, I spewed water as I lay on my side, the sea escaping from my strained lungs. “You’re alive. I thought you might be dead.”
I opened my eyes, staring at the side of our boat, as Ethan leaned over me, checking my vitals like I had taught him. “Where were you? You– the rope.”
“I’m right here now. I’m fine. I’m fine. You cranked the winch too fast, and the rope caught on a rusty nail down there, snapped the rope clean in two. Took me long enough to find the boat. Then there you were floating face-down in the ocean, I thought you were dead. You were dead, nearly.”
“But I’m not. Where are we?”
“We’ll need to paddle back to the island.” Ethan stood, shaking the salt water from his pants legs. The boat had flooded, and as Ethan rowed us in the right direction, I found a bucket to toss the water from our interior, though the rain made it impossible to keep dry. The rain died down by the time we reached our island, bumping against the marshy silt and hopping onto the shallow green platform surrounding our house.
“I need to show you something,” Ethan said, covering his eyes with one hand as he scanned the waves. “No one’s around. The smugglers– I don’t think they’re coming back.”
“What do you mean? How would you know?”
“I saw them. I mean, I saw their ship. They must have tried sailing into Charleston, but they crashed against the wall. Their whole vessel lies at the base of that wall.” He reached into his cloth bag and dumped a pile of gold jewelry on the table, chain necklaces and sparkling engagement rings. Then a rusted can of what must have been petroleum.
“Holy– you took it all?”
“Not all of it. There was a lot. They lost everything down there, at the bottom of the sea. But I found something even more important.” He reached into his pocket and removed orange medicine capsules, the kind they used to give out at pharmacies before people learned to print their medication for cheap at home. “That’s no Advil in there. Those are seeds.”
I picked up the capsule and studied it warily, reading a sticker label that had been hastily written on: Corn.
Submerged: Part Three
2156
When it began raining, we brought buckets, pots, Tupperware, flower vases, trash bins, and plastic cups outside. Anything that could catch water, we hauled outside. Then as the sky puked its guts like a binge-drinking frat boy during finals, we paddled off in our rickety dinghy. Work to do, beneath the shifting sea.
Irregular, to purchase fresh water in this part of the country, most of the land underneath the ocean, but rain came every few weeks; we collected every last drop. Ethan struck his paddle into the water and pushed our vessel away from a shallow mud bed. We floated between two strips of land into the open sea, where the waves crashed violently against the edge of our boat.
As Ethan changed into his rubbery diving suit, I took the paddle and furiously beat against the waves. Our island stood several miles away from the bay where Charleston lay. In the islands near the coast, a few people still lived, either too criminal or too poor to survive in a city. Most people lived in cities, because the federal government had invested billions to protect the patches of urban growth, the places where money came from.
They built walls and glass ceilings that filtered the sun’s UV rays; farms only existed in blooming skyscrapers, seeds sprouting in clean, white laboratories. Everything wild eradicated. And below the gleaming banks and offices with sterling views lay the waste of society. Slums strewn in the underbellies of luxurious hotels, these houses made of rotting wood and trash. The garbage was often unbelievable, sometimes flooding the streets. Sewage leaked into the streets, where children sifted through the muck that reached their knees, collecting trash to sell in local markets. For them, anything could have value, anything at all. Though we were no better, diving beneath the sea to strip garbage form forgotten cities, selling it to modern pirates.
Though the smugglers had not come, not for weeks. Before, they sailed the islands once a month, docking near us to buy whatever we had found. Sometimes copper, sometimes old car parts they no longer manufactured. Once, they paid us a fortune for a pack of unopened Coke cans. I wanted badly to let Ethan try drinking one, since they didn’t make sodas anymore– you needed water for that, but we sold every last can. All unopened, not too badly damaged. We had found them floating inside one of the abandoned houses underwater.
Ethan pulled the mask over his face and mumbled, “Ready.” Through the frothing waves, I could make out the dark patterns of Charleston’s streets.
“Stay close. We’re looking for more copper. Copper would be great.” He nodded, then flipped backwards out of the boat. I cranked the winch backwards, the rope snaking into the water slowly. The boat bobbed with each passing wave, the rain splattering against the brim of my hat and trickling down my neck, cold as death. Grasping the rope, I let it run against the edge of the dinghy, burning my palms raw. Rain made it slippery to grip, and Ethan kept tugging, traveling further and further from the boat.
Another wave crashed against the boat’s bow, water spraying onto the deck. The next onslaught fell heavier, crashing against my legs and nearly knocking me to the ground. The smugglers– they never came. What happened to those damned pirate bastards?
Not far from where the top of the wall still jutted from the ocean’s surface, a broad white sheet as grandiose and strong as the Hoover Dam. I sighed, bracing myself as the waves crashed harder against me. A foolish idea to row out in the middle of a storm, but we would have been stupid not to– only a few copper wires, and what was that worth? There must have been more, under every house here.
Lifting the rope, I pulled as tight as possible. Ethan, how incompetent– had he not found a suitable house by now? I felt a tug in the rope, a sign to begin cranking. Turning to the crank, I clutched the handle and turned it wildly. The winch whizzed loudly, even against the pounding of rain, the rope disappearing into a thick hemp spool. A minute later, the end of the rope rose from the water and whipped limply onto the boat deck.
Collapsing against the boat’s side, I clawed through the water. “Ethan?” Now I shouted his name. “Ethan.” But no head came bursting from the water. I tipped out of the boat, plunging my head beneath the sea. Bubbles escaped my mouth as I called out his name again, and again. Then I rolled over the side, plummeting through the waves.
*
2086
I had never lived in a city and never imagined one so antique like the kind you saw in classic movies. Like a tropical snow globe of pastel-bright houses and business men in flip-flops. But I arrived downtown in a traffic jam of shuddering cars, languid tourists, and horse-drawn carriages. All a mirage of simpler times, when no one worried the sea might kill us all.
Still, the reminder loomed clearly from many miles away, the wall half-finished. It would be over nine hundred feet tall when finished, a bleak white spectacle. In downtown Charleston, residents and visitors tromped around like nothing was happening, like the world wasn’t changing. At least someone had learned to ignore the inevitable.
I parked my truck by the docks where the man told me. Others waited anxiously, some without vehicles. Most looked like burnt-out college grads like me with too much stubble, and others looked unluckier. A man approached us wearing a bright-orange hardhat and holding a plastic clipboard.
“You’re the ones here for a construction job?” He chewed on a piece of gum, glancing at the wall thirty feet away, which struck out of the water solidly, a concrete barrier. “Follow me, and we’ll get you set up with jobs.”
We all needed jobs here, I realized, all of us desperate and drained of ambition. Lining up behind the hard-hat man, we followed him up a set of steel stairs to a stark office where a fat man in a red tie assigned us, seemingly randomly, to different crews.
“Top of the wall, block placement.”
“Filling cement.”
“Cement cutter.”
“Cement hauler.”
“Top of the wall.”
“Crane duty. Danny’ll teach you. Just head over there.”
“Cement hauler.”
“Look like a good cement hauler.”
When I approached him, he glanced at me only briefly before announcing “Cement cutter.” Before I even knew what that meant, I was ushered off with the other men and women assigned to cut cement. Really, the task seemed pretty easy after a burly black man explained it to us at the base of the wall. Some other people created these massive concrete blocks a few miles away, then the cement haulers brought the huge blocks to the wall, where we would cut it into smaller blocks depending on what the foreman wanted. Then we loaded the blocks onto palettes, which were moved by massive cranes to the top of the wall. There, hundreds of men shoved the block into place Egyptian-style. It seemed very crude to me, it being almost the twenty-second century, but I could hardly complain about scoring a job.
The next day, after sleeping in dorms the construction company provided, I walked down to the docks where other men began climbing onto the backs of the flatbed trucks. One of the supervisors handed me a portable concrete saw and indicated the freshly drawn black lines running down the length of the long cement blocks. After cranking the saw until it vibrated violently in my hands, I pressed the blade against the concrete. I could hardly hold the saw still as I attempted to trace the black line, and sparks spat from the blade as I jerkily cut.
Pulling the saw away from the block, I nearly fell over, weighed by the saw’s immense mass. “This is not as easy as I thought,” I muttered. The black man from the day before stood beside me, wearing safety goggles and calmly cutting. He turned to watch me as I reapplied the saw.
“Careful there, now. Wouldn’t want that saw to drop down, cut into your foot.” I shook my head, that no, I didn’t. But it was certainly one more thing to worry about.
Six weeks later, exhausted near the end of the day, I collapsed against the concrete block, and the saw veered from its path falling on top of me. But before the blade sliced through my chest, I grabbed it hard with my left hand. The blade sliced clean through my thumb, and as I fumbled with the saw, screaming, the blade fell against my wrist. Blood spurted from the stump as I crumpled to my knees. It took nearly ten minutes before the supervisor decided to call an ambulance.
And all I could think about as I blacked out, red lights blinking around me, men shouting, some jeering at my stupidity– now I was useless, truly useless, even for this sort of job.
Submerged: Part Two
2156
“Twenty-seven grams of copper wire,” Ethan told me, sliding the twisted wires off the scale and into a plastic baggie. “When are the dealers coming back to the island?”
“I don’t know. They haven’t been here in weeks. I just don’t know.”
I retreated to my room and lay down on my cot which sagged low, almost against the dirt. Sliding my watch off, I traced the seam between my flesh and prosthetic sections of my arm, and then I twisted my left hand forcibly until it detached. A full day, and only twenty-seven grams of copper to show for it. I needed things to sell, anything I could scavenge from the sea.
Everything on our island was very green, the grass and trees and thick foliage. It rained often enough to keep plants and ourselves alive, unlike other parts of the country. When I was a child, people still populated the arid Midwest. They lived in clean mansions atop red dunes, and elaborate pipes beneath the earth carried water from a basin hundreds of miles away. Today in the cities, they would charge a fortune for modern plumbing. The basins and aquifers and trickling streams dried up as the climate changed– the people left, and the desert consumed their lives. Buried their sports cars and leveled their massive houses. Everything just gone.
Fifty years ago, everywhere was either drying up or drowning.
When Ethan and I found the island jutting from the sea so far from the coast, we rejoiced. Other islands existed, but closer, the rare higher-lands that had become low-lands just as the low-lands had become the ocean floor. We built a lean-to from cypress wood, but storms successively knocked our shelters down. We lucked out during a non-rainy season and built a ramshackle cabin with three distinct rooms using fallen Palmettos and pieces of scrap metal. One wall was the hull of a luxury yacht that had crashed on some rocks a mile east, mostly rusted now.
We had no artificial lights except a fire we kept in the pit of a Cypress grove. Inside our house, the light filtered through slats in the trunks, but it was still too dark to see most of the time. Our doorframe came floating to us intact a month ago, and I still felt pride pushing open that wooden door. Those little things that reminded me of how life used to be.
Ethan sat by the shore, perched on smooth rocks as he scrubbed his feet with a sponge. Still cared about hygiene, though he’d have to swim thirty miles to west to find any females to impress. He looked across the rippling march tides. The marshes surrounded our island, one of the last green places, though that meant poisonous snakes lurking in the depths and clouds of bugs that clung to your face, until you had to spit them out and wipe them from your eyes. But at least we didn’t live like everyone in the cities, crammed into towering high-rises, pretending to feel safe.
The day I met Ethan, he canoed past me in an non-functional motorboat. I called out to him, and he warily rowed over. Not every day you find people who trust strangers, especially crazy, bearded, old ones like me. Ethan grew up in the city, but he ran away, though he never told me what he was running from. These days, everyone was running from something. He had a boat, and I showed him the old diving gear I found years ago. We could make money, I proposed. After all, most of peoples’ lives got lost beneath the water, and imagine what was waiting down there, ready to be found. Treasures, submerged.
*
2086
Still young enough to think I would one day turn into an adult like a caterpillar metamorphoses into a butterfly, I fumed as I climbed into my car and drove away from the restaurant. Some damned fast food joint, the kind where you could approach the counter and type in your order into one of those LED screens. You know the kind, the kind that automatically upgrade your order to extra-large if you don’t track back and edit. What a joke, the owner emphasizing with me as he told me I was over-qualified. That was the problem. Everyone was either not qualified enough or too qualified– no wonder machines fried our fries and grilled our burgers. It was pointless.
As I whipped onto the freeway, I mused about the angry old people I had seen protesting on television. Every time I glanced at my watch, the news showed some pensioners marching with picket signs: We Want Our Labor Human. Maybe they were right; maybe I needed to join them, start screaming at news anchors about how technology had stolen our jobs. I remembered once watching a classic movie my grandparents loved called Terminator, where machines enslaved humans and destroyed humanity, and I chuckled as I realized maybe that vision had subtly become reality.
I drove until night fell, and I was unsure I’d ever pull over– the gas tank would run low first, though my car traveled eighty miles for every gallon. Crossed the border into South Carolina, where there were no metropolises, only miles of barren pinelands. Pines and miles of gated suburbs, spotted with industrial Walmarts and horrific parking garages. When the sun began to rise, I stopped to piss, though I could not afford gas. A man stood at the corner of the road in a ramshackle booth, waving a sign proudly. One of these Machines-Took-Our-Jobs protestors, probably.
When I hobbled from the bathroom, the man stood by my car, grinning widely. “Son, you ain’t from around here? You from–” He read my license plate. “North Carolina?”
“I’m not from anywhere.”
“Well, then, where you headed?”
“Nowhere.”
“Not to go to the wall, to help build the greatest feat of architectural finesse South Cackalacky has seen since… since… well, the greatest. You ain’t heard? It’s in Charleston. A wall big enough to stop the sea.”
“The sea?” At the time I lived a life consumed with personal thoughts, giving little time to notice the events transpiring around me. “What’s wrong with the sea?”
“It’s getting higher, every year getting higher. So they’re searching for boys. That’s what I’m here for. Been all around the state, recruiting able, young persons to come help construct this damned wall.”
“I’m just passing through.”
“You don’t need no job? Ain’t likely. I seen a hundred or so boys like you– all pissed off, and ain’t no one your age can get a job anymore. Hell, this job ain’t even much.”
I swallowed. “I might be interested. Is there a number I can call, or something?”
He rifled through his pockets and licked his puckered lips, then produced a creased business card. “Got all the information you need right there.”
I stuck it into my pocket and drove away. Thirty minutes later, I pulled over again, the card in my hand, punching numbers into my cell phone.
Submerged: Part One
2156
Through the greenish glass of the goggles, the houses no longer looked like houses, only rotten skeletons. Some without four walls, some with punctured roofs, others wholly decimated with only a few stark wooden beams standing to show what once had been there. I swam past a street sign and rubbed a layer of algae from its surface. Crumpled at its edges and indecipherable, its blocked lettering had peeled away years ago. To my left I found a property where a house once stood, though now I hovered above only a smooth white platform. Years of sea current had polished it smooth, the only standing structure a stone staircase crumbling with age. Underneath, a hole where the door to a cellar might once have been.
Swimming toward it, I placed my hands at the edges of the door and pulled myself down. The concrete gaped like a stone-teethed scar where I entered. Adjusting my headlight to shine brighter, I proceeded into the cellar. Cans of preserved food bobbed against the ceiling, which I pulled into a cloth bag I wore attached to my waist. Rusted tools floated like flotsam around me. Behind a busted washing machine was a circuitry board– Jackpot. I retreated from the cellar and looked to the sparkling surface.
I tugged at the rope, and it grew taut until I rose through the water like an angel ascending. Above, Ethan cranked the winch furiously– my invention, since we could not afford enough gasoline to run our machinery. The city shrunk below me until it was only a ruined maze of uneven streets, deteriorating buildings, and abandoned cars.
It had been twenty years since the sea finally broke the levies, the wall fell, and the city drowned. In the distance, I could make the jagged outline of the wall we had built fifty years ago. Just out of college, pissed at my fortune, I signed up with other gullible young men for a grueling construction job. As the sea rose, the beach eroded, and islands flooded, the Charleston city council voted to build the wall, back when they still believed they could be safe.
I burst through the surface.
“How are you on oxygen?”
“Running low, but I have enough for another trip down. No need to switch the tank. I found an open cellar down there, and there may be something we can use.”
Ethan leaned against the battered dinghy, skimming the water with his hands. “Seeds?”
“No.” We needed seeds like we needed oxygen. If we found seeds, we could travel somewhere fertile, live off the land. Or sell them and buy a defunct cruise ship we’d populate with exotic women. But what might be under the house could be better, at least financially. “There might be copper.”
“Copper pipes?”
“Pipes? No, well, wires.”
“That’s nothing. It’s not worth it.”
Clambering aboard the boat, I strapped a heavy sledgehammer to my hip and heaved a portable concrete saw onto the boat’s ledge. “It’s worth it.” I nodded. “Are we all clear up here?”
“I haven’t seen any boats, no. Good you remembered this place. I didn’t expect much to be here. How’s it look down there?”
“Different than last time, to be sure.”
“How?”
“Don’t know. Different, I suppose. No people for one, and the whole city’s fallen apart. Some fish still lingering down there, which is surprising. Figured the water would be too polluted.” After the oil fields of the world dried up, frantic energy corporations bored holes into the ocean floor. Species died out, the sea filled with goopy black oil, and we slowly came to realize we were fucked, truly fucked, and had been for longer than we had known. We still believed oil meant life or death. Then we began running out of water.
The North American continent solidified into a single nation, but what territory you lived in, that changed all the time. Local, secessionist movements sprang up every five years, and some asshole would come around, asking you to fight in their ragtag army. Then the continental nation would regain control, and this happened too often for people like me to keep caring. It no longer mattered where you lived, as long as you figured out how to live.
“You sure you can do this?” Ethan eyed the concrete saw, then peered through the ocean surface at the ghost city.
“Sure. I’m fine. As long as no government boats don’t come up here and fuck us, we’ll be fine, kid.”
“I can go down there, you know. You should trust me.”
“You don’t have enough practice. Maybe when we’ve practiced more.”
“But– but we can’t practice if you continue to not let me dive. You’re what, seventy?”
“Yes, but you’re only fifteen. Maybe next time. Now, start cranking that winch backwards.” I slipped off the edge of the boat, and I sank fast, the saw and sledgehammer weighing me down. Down into the submerged city.
The rope unraveled behind me as I guided my descent toward the vanished house. Through the hole, into the dark cellar. I chose a place a few feet away from the washing machine and place the saw against the concrete floor, revving its electric engine. Whirring, screaming, spitting bubbles at my face. If I had not been underwater, the saw might have thrown sparks into the air as the blade sliced smoothly through the floor. I cut a block shape, then swung the hammer against the square repeatedly until cement chunks and grainy particles choked the water.
Poem: “Sacred”
I could warn you that this poem contains language
But every poem does.
Don’t be fooled by the peach fuzz:
I swear like a sailor,
Still scarred like a failure.
The sacred won’t always do,
But the profane sounds perfect.
Because sometimes life stinks like shiitake mushrooms.
Sometimes, you fudge up.
Guillotine’s pressed against your neck.
Everything’s darned to heck.
Everyone you know is a bloody boat-licker,
Lick-spittled, tarnated butt-kicker.
Language shapes thoughts which forms actions
Which reflect reactions, cause gee wiz
Ain’t those rules just Cheez n’ Crackers?
Egad! The moral pressures of Catholic school
Have us screaming in the streets, wondering
What the Dickens we should say
In polite company, in a polite way,
Around the dinner table.
Sometimes, we’re not able to express ourselves
But by thundering blasted obscenities
At the top of our lungs.
Confound it, I’m done with the doggone bull-hockey!
Nothing you can say will shock me.
Just tell me your stories and your truth,
And it won’t matter what buggered words you use.
The Case for “Drug Safety Education” Reform in Public Schools
{The statements expressed in this essay are the sole opinion of the author, Derek Berry, and do not necessarily reflect the philosophies of all of the harm reduction groups discussed}
In fifth grade, I won an essay contest for D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education), a program devoted to keeping kids from abusing drugs and alcohol. The essay, I read in front of my entire fifth grade class and their parents, probably making them deeply uncomfortable with righteous statements of abstaining from smoking cigarettes, forgoing the consumption of alcohol.
I do not believe I even mention “drugs” in the essay because the thought of abstaining from them never occurred to me: only homeless parasitic liberals used drugs, and I lived in South Carolina where I rarely encountered this breed. (To be fair, DARE has addressed my most serious concern of prescription drug use that I address below, and I have nothing against D.A.R.E., only wish to criticize its approach).
What strikes me about the program is how the officers and teachers attempting to divert us from a life of drug abuse: just say no. Nancy Reagan pioneered the “Just Say No” campaign in the 1980′s, becoming perhaps the most influential first ladies of her time. Not only is this approach slightly rude (Just Say NO THANK YOU), its notion that feeding horror stories to children about drug abuse will deter them from experimenting with drugs is deeply flawed. For more information on “Just Say No,” visit reaganfoundation.org.
Fact: Since 1990 a reported 20.5 million people have used marijuana in an average year.
(http://www.drugscience.org/Archive/bcr4/2Usage.html)
Statistic: 40% of Americans over the age of 12 have tried cannabis sativa (marijuana).
(http://www.soberlifeinc.net/js/modalbox/content/g.htm)
Now, this statistic is mighty misleading because cannabis, of course, might be considered a milder drug than many people actually consume, but it gives a good idea to how effective the “Just Say No” philosophy is. If a majority of American school children went through this D.A.R.E. program and still experimented with one of the drugs that were advised against, what other drugs might they try? Despite cannabis being relatively harmless, its use often help guide users into use and abuse of harder, more dangerous drugs.
What I would like to propose is certainly not an obliteration of drug awareness education but rather a more realistic approach to educating our kids about drugs. In many middle schools, groaning school children sit through Sex Ed classes, where the philosophy has shifted from “Abstinence-Only” education to “Protection” education. Teachers and administrators realize the reality of teenage sexuality, that many teens will not abstain from sex and without the proper knowledge, could end up impregnating each other and transferring potentially life-threatening STD’s.
Naturally, I am aware that sexual education also is lax, that despite efforts information is not always transmitted in the most effective means. What proponents of sexual education have done right, however, is take into account that a portion (even if not a majority) of teenagers will experiment sexually with more than one partner and without the know-how to protect themselves, they could end up in serious trouble. We need to admit to ourselves that American youths do indeed indulge in drugs and if we want to save them, we have to be honest with them. We have to educate them.
(http://ssdp.org/resources/facts-and-statistics/)
This approach has worked more effectively with alcohol education. The College of Charleston where I attend requires each student to complete an Alcohol Edu course online before attending for the semester because they have grown aware that students break the law, that students will drink alcohol whether the law permits them to or not. Many students approach drugs with the same mindset, but during the Alcohol Education class, the only drug mentioned was marijuana and only briefly. (It made some comment about knowing what ingredients are in the brownies you eat on campus).
There grows a serious problem here, one that we prefer to ignore. The more we delude ourselves that kids will not experiment with dangerous drugs, the larger chance we take. We’re metaphorically throwing two hormonal teenagers together in a room without a condom and telling them to “not do anything bad.”
We must equip the next generation with the knowledge they need if they do experiment with drugs because to not do so is the marginalize a great portion of the younger society, to basically say that while we care about helping prevent alcohol poisoning, we have no intention of preventing drug overdose.
A brief anecdote if you will permit:
I attended a party one night and had left my bag in my friend’s bedroom. When I entered the bedroom to retrieve the bag, I found a girl laying on the bed transfixed on the television.
“Are you okay?”
She nodded very slowly, and I approached her, asking again, “Are you okay?”
“Just a little high.”
“On what?”
She didn’t say anything, just shrugged, then pointed to her IPhone on which remained residue on a crushed-up white substance (it turned out to be molly, a drug growing in popularity among the alternative scene: pure MDMA, though it is often cut with things that are not MDMA including heroin, speed, or methamphetamine. To find out more about this drug, go here.)
“How much of that did you take?”
Another shrug.
“How much? Are you okay?” She certainly did not look alright and if then I had been informed as I am now I might have sought medical attention, but she exhibited no signs of overdose. Rather, someone had helped administer the drug, then left her alone while she experiencing a mood-altering drug for the first time.
“It’s okay. The guy who sold it to me said it was basically harmless. I wouldn’t overdose.”
Fin.
Let’s talk about some of the immensely major problems we encounter in this story. A young girl trying a drug for the first time did not know what drug she had tried, had not inquired what the drug might have been cut with, and she was unsure how much of the “basically harmless” drug she had snorted.
Here’s a good rule to keep in mind: you can’t trust what a dealer says. Even if he’s your friend, your uncle, or your pediatrician (we’ll get to prescription drugs as well), you should educate yourself on the drugs you’re taking. You and you alone are responsible for using a drug sensibly, if you choose to use a drug. After all, if McDonald’s isn’t willing to tell you what’s in your chicken nuggets, what makes you certain that someone you don’t know that well will be honest about what your ecstasy is cut with?
Because of the lack of drug education, many people don’t know what a lot of drugs even look like. They do not know what various drugs might DO to
them when snorted, injected, smoked, parachuted, huffed, or eaten. My personal theory is that many people experiment with various drugs to “experience what they feel like,” but if people knew more clearly their full effects and also the dangers posed by various drugs, they could avoid seriously harming themselves through experimentation.
While there is no single great resource completely backed by scientific research yet, there are still resources to educate yourself about drugs. Even if you do not personally experiment with drugs, you should be aware of the effects of drugs and what to do in the case of an overdose. It is also important to know what different drugs might do when taken together (an especially lethal idea, mind you).
My most-trusted resource is erowid.org, a website devoted to proliferating this knowledge to the general public. For each drug that exists is a page listing statistics, researched effects, and chemical properties. Be able to identify whether your friend or acquaintance might be experiencing an overdose or even a “bad trip” from psychoactive drugs.
Just as important as it is to know how to prevent these events is the knowledge to deal with them if they happen. Remember that everyone has a different body weight and build, meaning that different amounts of a particular drug will affect individuals differently. If more credible sources existed as to how one should take drugs safely and what to look for, we could avoid much of the grief surrounding drug addiction and overdose.
Another good resource is dancesafe.org. Dance Safe is an organization devoted to helping people take safer drugs. On their website, you can buy drug-testing kits with which one can delineate the contents of the pills one might be taking. For more information about what drugs might be cut with and how, visit their website.
I learned about this organization and much of this information through a school group SSDP (Students for Sensible Drug Policy) which each week helps educate students about safe drug use, the war on drugs, and progressive legislation in drug policy. We do not condone or condemn drug use, only hope that through spreading knowledge about how to use drugs safely, we can decrease the rate of overdose among our generation and generations to come. Our organization is also committed to end the War on Drugs, a subject about which I will elaborate on in future posts.
Fact: More American are arrested for marijuana each year than for all violent crimes combined.
(Students for Sensible Drug Policy)
There’s one more important piece of the puzzle that must addressed: legal pharmaceuticals.
When we do teach youth about drugs, we focus on drinking underage and the abuse of illegal drugs. In fifth grade, I often rolled my eyes when officers told us of scare stories of people addicted to meth or heroin. Today, naturally, I believe meth and heroin addiction are very serious, but at least this is viewed as a problem by the American population. What often escapes our notice is the widespread addiction to narcotics.
Another Fact: The most commonly abused drug among high school seniors are prescription and over-the-counter drugs.
(http://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/topics-in-brief/prescription-drug-abuse)
Narcotics, opiates, and amphetamines all share addictive qualities, but because we receive prescriptions for them from doctors, we assume they are inherently safer to take than drugs that are illegal. Several pain-killers (such as Oxycodone and hydrocodone) prove to be as addictive as morphine, and because these drugs are seen as “legitimate,” patients tend to abuse them.
What’s just one more pill, right? You’ve just undergone surgery, so you begin taking more and more pills, building up a resistance to their effects. You take more. You try to stop taking them, but you feel so terrible without them (this is you going through withdrawal), so you renew your prescriptions. Doctor says to take two a day, but only two pills never works, so you take three, four, five. Your new prescription runs out, and you can’t renew it, so you start buying painkillers from a fifteen-year-old down the street. You’re just dealing with pain, with stress, right? You’re not actually addicted.
This is why pharmaceuticals become so widely abused. Because of the intense stigma on illegal “uppers,” many students snort Adderal recreationally. They pop a Vivance before a night of essay-writing as “a study enhancement.” Just take one more for the final exam, and then you’ll never do them again. But addiction sneaks up on you like that, dropping the trapdoor from under your feet before you get the chance to realize you’re standing on top of it.
In our drug awareness classes, we should address these problems. We cannot tell them “Do not do drugs or you will die.” They might try marijuana, then wonder, “What else did they lie about? How safe are drugs?” We need to educate youth on specific drugs, how to use them sensibly, what their effects are, and what drugs are potentially lethal, even pharmaceuticals. Too often as well, we find a kid who might be “too jumpy,” and we begin feeding him pills he could potentially abuse or even sell to his friends for them to abuse. And that sort of madness, that zombie mentality of “saying no” to certain illegal drugs, “saying of course” to legal pharmaceuticals, and never seeking information about the drugs we’re consuming– that leads to the overwhelming rates of overdose we experience.
While D.A.R.E. has addressed this and does at least offer some counsel about drug abuse, these resources should be more widely available and apparent to both youth and their caregivers.
I will conclude with a plea: begin treating drug abuse with the same amount of realism we apply to alcoholism. It can happen; it can happen to you; your friends might be addicted; your grandma might be addicted. If you’re a student at the College of Charleston or any other university, I encourage you to take the first step to help reforming drug safety education by perhaps visiting your local chapter of SSDP.
At CofC, we are currently petitioning to change the Good Samaritan Policy to apply not just to victims experiencing alcohol poisoning but drug overdose as well. To differentiate over who is important to save and who is not is a cruel determination forced upon us by the stigmas surrounding drug use that do not apply as evenly to alcohol consumption. The Good Samaritan Policy allows students on campus to call Public Safety for help if a friend is experiencing alcohol-related sickness, and neither the victim or Samaritan will face criminal charges; a member of SSDP is pioneering the change to this policy to include overdose victims as well.
For more information concerning the Good Samaritan Policy, refer to {http://studentaffairs.cofc.edu/policies/amnesty-policy.php} or contact me to sign the petition. For information, find me via Facebook or on campus. The SSDP meets at 6:30 on Wednesday on the second floor of Stern.
For more information on drug use and experience, check out erowid.org.
For more information about preventing drug abuse in raves, visit dancesafe.org.
Please consider my points carefully as we move forward in a world where drug chemistry is ever-changing; what one drug might do or might be made of can change within a week. Delineations of drugs crop up often, and we must stay ever vigilant and knowledgeable of what is out there to avoid future generations from experiencing the same overdose rates as we have.
Other Sources:
