I find this speech poignant. But it reminds me of the NY Times article on White (affluent, non-Southern) families seeking a “gentler” war on drugs than the war we’ve been waging for most of the 20th century. This war is racist, it is classist, it is regionalist, and it has been all of that from the very beginning. But the elite of American society, the Southern landed gentry, the urban elite, had been using these drugs for the whole time, too, even after criminalizing it for Black and White working class people.

But now….NOW, because it has gotten out of hand among the upper class, now it is a problem to be solved non-violently, to be treated as a disease and epidemic and not as a criminal enterprise to be cracked over the head and shot through with bullets. Now, after the death and destruction of the war on drugs, we wonder what the fuck we are going to do.

Chris Christie is disturbed and confused by how his classmate of greater means ended up losing everything by getting strung out on percocet and xanax. But it has not hit him just how much destruction has befallen those of lesser means who end up dying on or over addictive drugs.

If Christie is running for president and really wants to understand why people say “they’re getting what they deserved”, the fact that we have cultivated and nursed our cultural anti-drug-user pathology over a century has to hit him with a force comparable to that of a roid-jacked drug-warrior policeman’s billy club.

We helped build this house of rage against the working class and their use of drugs, and now, because the affluent among us are dying from the malady, we’re no longer in love with this shit house that we’ve built. Oh noes. “#AllLivesMatter”, indeed. Hah. HAH! Not for the last century!

#LeelahAlcorn was right. Fix this society, please. #BlackLivesMatter #Occupy #EndMassIncarceration