Give Me Booze Or Give Me Death

Just a little rant

I guess that when it comes to booze, I’m an odd sort of fellow. Most people who know me tend to believe that I drink a lot. But, alas, that just isn’t true. I drink infrequently, and when I do indulge, I try to refrain from getting drunk.

I do know why the perception varies from the reality. My wife and I have two bars set up in our home, and back in the days when I had an office, I kept a bar set up in it as well. I don’t do this because I drink a lot, I do this because I love the sociality that can come along with alcohol.

Photo by Ash Edmonds on Unsplash

Years ago, smoking was largely a part of that.

Is there anything better than a cigarette, a cigar, or a pipe to go along with a fine cocktail? I think not.

But then the control freaks got involved. They outlawed smoking in bars here in the upper left hand corner of the United States.

It became so that the only place that I could publicly enjoy a fine spirit, along with a fine smoke was Mexico. But, alas, the control freaks eventually reached even there, spreading their gospel of drudgery.

Now the only place I can engage in the noble ritual of a cigar and a bourbon is in a private club in Seattle.

Today, like an idiot, I turned on the television news. They’ve got two stories.

The Surgeon General of the United States wants to put new warning labels on bottles of booze. Because by manipulating and contorting statistics, he thinks he can somehow claim that twenty thousand or so people die in our country per year, from cancer miraculously caused by alcohol.

Yeah. Because maybe twenty thousand die out of a population of three hundred and thirty five million.

As if public health officials had a shred of credibility left.

The other big story was about something the media is calling ‘Dry January’ and how all the cool people are giving up booze in January.

Give me a break.

The control freaks largely succeeded in getting rid of tobacco, so now they are coming after booze, because it is their ultimate goal to strip all joy from human life. To replace lives of meaning with lives of drudgery.

And they do all this in the name of safety, and health, and ‘the children.’ Of course.

Again, I’m not much of a drinker, but the control freaks can have my bottle of Knob Creek when they pry it from my cold dead hands.

Thinking of cold dead hands, that brings me to guns.

I can’t possibly understand why this might be, but the vast hordes of control freaks running around in our society only object to middle class people enjoying themselves. They don’t object to actual criminals, committing actual crimes.

So, in a lot of places, like my State of Washington, the government has just sort of given up on punishing criminal behavior.

My little city has an extensive system of cameras called Flock or some such. The idea behind them is that as one drives around the city, the car’s license plate is captured and run across a law enforcement database. It’s a really bad thing for civil liberties, but a really effective tool for catching car thieves.

Recently, I can’t remember exactly when, two or three weeks ago I suppose, my wife and I were kicking back one afternoon watching television in our living room.

All of the sudden, we heard a dog going nuts outside.

So, we went to the big glass doors that open onto our front patio. The police, I believe eight cars in total, used my truck that was parked on the street as a part of a roadblock, and by doing so had stopped a snazzy BMW. The crazy barking was from the police’s K9.

We wandered onto the patio to catch the action. Nobody better accuse me of not being a rubbernecker! We hurried off the patio when the police got out of their cars with rifles instead of handguns.

It didn’t take too long to get the driver and passenger out of the car under gunpoint, and when the guns were put away, we wandered back out to watch the show.

That whole process took quite a bit of time, but in the end it turned out that the car was indeed stolen, and we watched the police discover and bag for evidence a fairly decent quantity of one drug or another.

The police had the car towed away, wrote down all kinds of stuff, then cut the driver and passenger loose. The last we saw them they were walking towards downtown.

Why would this be?

No doubt because of something called (in my neck of the woods) ‘jail booking restrictions.’ You see, during the pandemic, the County decided that it couldn’t fill up its jail for health reasons. So, they would routinely turn away arrestees from the cities located within the County. Now of course the pandemic is long behind us, but as I understand it, these ‘jail booking restrictions’ remain. The last time I read about them in our newspaper the excuse now given was a lack of employees at the jail or some such nonsense.

The real reason, of course, is because the control freaks don’t care about enforcing moral laws against actual criminals. Their focus is instead fully on controlling the lives of normal, middle class, law abiding, families.

And of course, for them to ultimately succeed in making the world healthy, safe, and mind numbingly dull, they have to get rid of the guns.

So that has been their unending, overarching quest ever since 1968.

They won’t succeed in getting the guns from criminals. It is already illegal for criminals to own guns, and government has failed miserably at enforcing those laws. No, if they get their way, they will only succeed in taking the guns from the middle class. Disarming the general population while allowing crime to run free.

The control freaks have largely gotten rid of tobacco. They are making strong strides towards disarming the middle class. Now they are working to demonize booze. (Forgetting apparently that they succeeded in doing this once before, and that their Prohibition experiment failed miserably.)

What’s next on the control freak agenda?

Unfortunately, that’s a really easy question to answer.

It’s this.

It’s my keyboard.

(And yours.)

It’s Substack.

It’s our ability to write and publish our thoughts, and to have those thoughts be read by others.

It’s already happening.

We can see it. If our eyes are open.

The control freaks are waging a war against our liberties, on all fronts. If we hope to defeat them, we must do the same.

Let’s not allow them to turn us into drudges. People who no longer have lives of meaning and joy. People who have nothing, and do nothing, but work and spend.