The Opiate of the Masses

One of the first TV shows that I remember featured Bishop Fulton J. Sheen. My parents liked him because they said he was a terrific public speaker and made a lot of sense, in spite of the fact that he was a Catholic. I don't remember much of his material, but I do remember the one time when he said that Karl Marx had gotten it wrong when he claimed that religion is the opiate of the masses. "The truth is that television is the opiate of the masses." The audience enthusiastically responded in agreement, apparently missing the irony of the fact that Sheen himself was making this statement on his own prime time weekly television show.

TV was still pretty new in those days, but I remember seeing scenes in the news of Third World slum neighborhoods with a TV antenna on the roof of every shack. That's not so common nowadays, I suppose they all have cable by now. In my early days in Cheboygan (this was in the late 60s), I knew several families that didn't have indoor plumbing in their houses, but they all had a color TV set. They way it was explained to me was that a TV set is much cheaper than a rural water and septic system. Maybe so but, to my way of thinking, TV is a luxury while running water is a necessity, but that's just me.

Most of the violators I talked to came from poor rural backgrounds like that. They themselves had good jobs at the paper mill, but old habits die hard, and they still thought of themselves as poor people. I doubt that a word like "ideology" would be in their vocabulary, not because they were uneducated, but because it was the kind of uppity word that poor people would never use. To my knowledge, there has never been a violators' organization that held meetings and elected officers. I've never seen a letter of theirs in the newspaper or any sportsmen's magazine. There are websites for everything nowadays, so there might be one for violators, but I have not heard of one. For some time now, sportsmen have been lamenting the fact that young people are not taking up the tradition nearly as fast as the old timers are dying off. This has motivated sportsmen's groups and our DNR to conduct programs designed to lure more young people into hunting, fishing, and other outdoor activities. I have not heard of any such efforts being made by the violator community but, like I said, I don't get around much anymore.

It's true that Michigan has a lot of hunting seasons but, in my lifetime, small game has gotten pretty scarce. I doubt that this is attributable to hunting pressure, since deer hunting has always been more popular in Michigan than all the small game species put together. Some say it's due to an increase in the natural predator population. Nobody traps anymore, and hawks, owls, and eagles have been protected for a long time now.

Wild hogs are starting to show up in parts of Michigan, and efforts are being made to suppress them. I don't think these are just farm pigs gone wild, they would never survive a typical northern winter. The species you hear most about is the Russian boar, raised on game farms for the shooting preserve trade. Michigan has passed legislation banning those kinds of hogs from the state but, last I heard, it was being challenged in the courts, like everything else nowadays.