Jackhammer and Drill...

I know an old cop who hates drugs, hates them with a passion.  In his world drugs are the headwaters for all the rivers of misery that flood the marshes of mankind, the sinkholes and quicksand bogs that consume lives.  He is certain if that river of drugs would dry up, or even just run a bit slower he could make it in and back out to help those he genuinely does have compassion for, the ones he spent a career watching suffer and die and spread despair.  And I'm not going to say he isn't right, at least to a degree.  It has to be hard for him to realize his efforts were at best stop gaps, that the law can never do more than deal on the symptoms of a problem because law can only act in response, always fighting on the defensive, never able to take the offensive towards victory.

In truth his enemy wasn't really the river of drugs, it's the wellspring thought that feeds the river of drugs: the idea that being intoxicated makes life a better place to be.  The river you can dam or divert, but so long as those springs are flowing you can't really win in the long run, sooner or later the pressure of those springs will cause what is being spewed to work its' way right under your very feet.  I only mention him to set perspective on an ambition of mine which is very much subject to the same conundrum, a problem where so far no one has been able to do more than treat symptoms. 

It is my resolve that what is known as the bdsm lifestyle should become a social non sequitur, a mode of thought fading from prominence to become null and void and ultimately forgotten.  The problem I, or anyone else for that matter, will always have with such an ambition is the fact an idea is almost impossible to kill.  To work devastation on any number of practitioners of some idea is no more difficult than the task of identifying them, a fairly simple matter of surveillance really.  Beyond that minor obstacle mankind has, sadly, made himself more than proficient in dealing death and despair one on the other.  But the practitioners of such things are like that river of drugs, they are not the driving force of the problem, they're most generally the victims of the problem: victims trapped like a weed rooted in the ethical cracks of a culture, so deep rooted and perennial the culture comes to accept the deformities as inevitable, and being inevitable therefore acceptable by default.

Well, if my intent was to have a weed free driveway it wouldn't be that big a deal now would it.  Just trot down to the local lawn and garden store, there's half a dozen poisons refined specifically for killing the roots growing in the cracks.  But my intent isn't a weed free driveway, my intent is a weed free society and contrary to the rumors there really isn't any single poison available for that job. It isn't like mankind hasn't tried to create such a concoction, far from it.  But every single one has presented the same problem: in the process of killing one kind of weed it turns out to fertilize two others.   Religion has failed, no form of law has really made a dent, social conventions corrupt out and fail almost as quickly as they're brought on line.  The deformities remain, and with the deformities an overall diminishment of societies' viability and, ultimately, survivability.

So... what hasn't been tried?  To stay in analogy what hasn't been tried is exposing the dirt under the driveway to the sunshine.  I say it's time to fire up the big compressors, get out the jackhammers and hammer drills and bust some concrete.  Those aren't that hard to come by, not really, pretty much any equipment rental outfit will have several of varying sizes.  What isn't so easily come by are the correct bits, not when what needs busted are the paradigms and double standards that get blended to form the poorly poured and crack prone concrete modern society suffers from.

That's where my head is going to be for a good while into the future, taking what I've learned in the last couple of months and applying it to the idea of busting out the cracks in my society, treating them just like I would any other crack in any other load bearing material... figuring out how to find the ends of the cracks so I can drill those ends and stop the spread, figuring out how to cut open the cracks so a deep repair can be made, and most importantly figuring out how to stabilize the subsurface pressures that produced the crack in the first place so the repaired material won't be subjected to a tenth the force of the original.   

That last is really the ultimate fix, stabilizing the subsurface forces that produced the cracks.  As long as there are cracks there's gonna be weeds, but if there's no cracks the weeds have to grow out in the open where they're easily dealt with and poisons aren't really needed.  I have a few ideas percolating that just might work.  And I kind of like the idea of a poison free society.  Kind of runs alongside the idea of shutting down that river of drugs to a tiny stream to small to really drown anybody in misery.  Overall just a better place to live, you know?