Something I’ve often wondered was why we haven’t made more of an effort to create some sort of entity to work together on problems that face the North American continent as a whole.
What most people in elected offices do is play the political game of using issues like drugs and immigration as consistent cannon fodder for their own interests. It’s a constant tactic used to maintain their position in government, stoking their constituents into believing that their simple raising of the issue amounts to some sort of solution to the problem.
But it doesn’t. And it won’t.
Elected leaders tend to say things that sound like a solution. They talk about a plan, which may or may not exist in greater detail. And if it does exist, it’s loaded with legalese that makes it difficult for the average person to fully comprehend the doublespeak that always exists as an exit strategy to that leader’s responsibility.
More often than none, it starts and ends with that single entity. At least in America, we tend for forge ahead on a single front.
It’s never really worked on these issues, and that might be by design. Like a never ending war that always demands your support for the cause that defends your freedoms, they attack Goliath with a peashooter and never aim above the knees.
Because if that mighty, threatening giant stays out there on the horizon, just far enough that you can’t see but can be convinced that it’s there, that leader can keep you holding on to the idea that it is.
It’s coming. Believe them that it’s coming.
And that any other idea or solution outside of their own might help or work on said problem is a preposterous notion.
How dare you think that anything else could be done that is outside the concept that has already been laid out before you, especially by anyone not on the same team. “They” are the ones who are wrong and will never get it right. “They” should never be trusted.
All of this happens inside their own borders, within the frameworks of elected leaderships. Silos within silos of ideology hellbent on maintaining their position of king of the hill. You just need to trust them on this, and if you need proof, they’ll give you the proof you need while telling you that anything contradictory is not to be believed.
But like many of their constituents, they’ll never go beyond the rhetoric they tell themselves and reach out to others for guidance or, heaven forbid, better ideas.
That’s just more of what is going on here. Senator Grassley is lobbing out some refrigerator magnet headlines so he can say, “Look what I did!”
He’s also up for re-election in a little over a week, hoping you see this tweet from a 90 year old man that has been a senator in the U.S. government since 1980.
40 years, and the southern border is still a problem for drug trafficking. In the 80’s, it was cocaine. The 90’s, methamphetamine. 2000’s, heroine.
Why do we need more hearings to hear how bad things are when we already know how bad it has been for the last four decades?
In Chuck Grassley’s Iowa, meth production and consumption has been some of the highest in the United States for the last half of his entire time in government and continues to destroy lives to this day, something I’ve barred witness to after reconnecting with former high school classmates via social media, some unrecognizable from their former selves due to the toll the drugs took on their bodies.
The U.S. solution from within has not and will not work. More political efforts will be made to try and probably even succeed for an amount of time for everyone to feel good enough to forget and move on until it becomes a problem again, usually getting the most air time on the problem around the time of the next election cycle. Meanwhile, the cartels adapt, react, and innovate like a hawkish venture capitalist always looking for that next opportunity to grow their portfolio.
The solution to this sick cycle can only be found when looked at from a collaborative, continental perspective. Whatever has been tried before has to be only thought about in reference to what can be achieved to lift up the lowest so that we can all prosper on a greater plain.
Going it alone with ideas like these where we throw more peashooters at Goliath will never cut to the root of the problem as much as it serves to keep the issue coming back around for timely political gains of the few that it truly benefits.