June 6th, 2012

So, in my last LITSL I put in a blurb about my frustration with the war on drugs, and a number of you responded with basically the same thing.  Becca may have said it best when she said the following:

"I don't think it's really ABOUT restricting personal choice for those that insist on keeping this drug war going.  I think it's about making money.  Loads of money.  More money than you or I could possibly fathom.  The kind of money that makes it okay to kill thousands of people every year and allow armed gangs to decapitate 45 people at a go and bury them in a shallow grave.  As an article I recently read said, it's about savage capitalism: "The best example of capitalism working completely free of regulation, with no laws and no compassion is the globalized and armed drugs business."  As with most things that are evil, it's about making money for people who already have too much, and that's what they're trying to protect.  Keeping drugs illegal keeps them expensive, means they have to be protected and fought with guns, which is another profitable business."

Which brings up an interesting discussion.  See, I don't think she's wrong, at all.   But I also don't think your average middle American is running around going "let's keep up this war on drugs, because that keeps the prices high!"  I think the average middle American is buying into the propaganda that drugs are bad and need to be illegal, yada yada yada, which is how law makers justify to their constituents that they have failed to legalize them.

So, here's the interesting part:  how much are we just ants in a hive, do you think?  I mean, how really powerless are we?  If we all stood up tomorrow and asked for drugs to be legalized, could we get it done?  Or are the people making the money really and truly in control?

I want to know what you think.  Feel free to expound mightily.  I'm not really sure how I feel.  Sometimes I think we're ants.  And sometimes I think we're not.

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Right, so...

Some of you, although surely not all of you, may have noticed that I took a fairly long hiatus from life in the slow lane this spring.  I sent my last email about two weeks ago, and before that I hadn't sent one since mid January. 

That's because things have been afoot, here in my life, and I have not been at liberty to discuss them.  And, with only one thing on my mind, I found I didn't have the urge to babble about stuff that wasn't really interesting to me at the moment.

Recently I've been made at liberty, so now I'm going to share what I've been sitting on for the past several months.

Waxor, it turns out, it transgendered.  He (and I use that pronoun purposefully, since he's not ready to take the plunge and switch) is growing his hair out, wearing women's clothes, and talking about taking hormones.  It's not an overnight thing; it's a process.  But it took me several months to get a grip on it and how I felt about it, thus my hiatus.

I'm not going to go into a lot of detail here.  I'm sure a number of you couldn't care less, since you pretty much only read these emails for the hilarious accounts of the trials of motherhood.  Others of you may be vastly uncomfortable with the idea of knowing more, and that's okay, too.  I'm not planning on forcing TMI on anyone who doesn't want it.  But if any of you want to know more, or want to ask me questions, please do.  I have a whole lot of friends around here who are awesome, but who are also mostly focused on supporting Waxor through whatever transition he goes through.  Those of you who live farther away get the dubious honor of being invited by me to share my own, rather different experience.

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Well, I really think two heavy topics is more than enough for any one email, don't you?  I think I'll just send this off now.