None of Our Business

I seem to be kind of a heretic on this Ukraine issue. I thought that, when Russia renounced Communism, they ceased being the bad guys. The current bad guys are the Islamic terrorists, and I think we've got enough to keep us busy right there. The Crimea just voted fair and square to secede from the Ukraine and join up with Russia, which sounds like democracy in action to me. Aren't we supposed to be for democracy? I guess the rest of the Ukraine isn't very happy about that, but neither were the British when the American colonies voted to secede from them. Russia may have over reacted when they sent those troops into the Crimea, but I haven't heard any allegations of fraud or coercion with the election. I think it all started when the Ukrainian president wanted to increase economic ties with Russia, while the Ukrainian parliament wanted to sign a deal with some other European countries instead. So the president skipped the country, leaving the parliament free to cozy up to whomever they wanted. The Crimeans, who are mostly ethnic Russians anyway, then decided to take their ball and go home. I don't think any of this threatens U.S. interests or world peace. It's a local yokel issue, and the local yokels seem to be handling it just fine on their own. If the United States or, God forbid, the United Nations gets involved, it will only insure that the issue will go unresolved for decades, maybe forever.

It sounds like this hippie thing is something that evolved more or less spontaneously with no central leadership. Back in the day, some of us thought that it was part of the Communist conspiracy to take over the world, but we thought that about a lot of things. Now that I think of it, the collapse of Russian Communism was to our guys like the end of the Vietnam War was to your people. It's kind of hard to be a fanatic when you don't have a fanatical enemy, or at least a perceived fanatical enemy, to deal with. It's a good thing those Islamic terrorists came along when they did or we wouldn't have anybody to blame for our problems except each other.

When I was telling you about the drug problem in Cheboygan I forgot to mention the crack cocaine, which is another one that keeps showing up in the news. Last I heard, heroin was even starting to make a comeback. There's probably more pot around than there was in the 60s, and now they're talking about legalizing it. It's already legal for medical use, but they keep arguing about the details of production and sale. The ballot proposal that legalized pot for medical use wasn't very specific about that, which is why I voted against it. I said at the time that they should just legalize it or not instead of fooling around with half way measures like that.

It has occurred to me that one of the reasons that pot hasn't been legalized until recently is that people associated it in their minds with the hippie culture. Now that the hippies are too old to cause much trouble, and all kinds of other people seem to be doing drugs, the legalization of pot doesn't seem like such a radical idea anymore.