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Honolulu Lite Charles Memminger |
Discussing ice abuse
on an idiotic levelMy recent suggestion that we fight the evils of crystal methamphetamine abuse with a "Don't Be An Ice Idiot" campaign (modeled on the original "Don't Be A Litter Bug" campaign) got off to a rocky start with an angry reader chastising me for calling meth smokers "idiots."
We have, my friends, come to a place in history where it is politically incorrect to refer to people who deliberately suck illegal, poisonous and brain-destroying fumes into their bodies, as idiots.
An idiot, according to the dictionary, is a feeble-minded or foolish person, and idiocy is the display of an extreme degree of mental deficiency. Is it not a tad foolish to ruin your life and your family's life by smoking ice? Are you not displaying an extreme degree of mental deficiency when you burglarize your neighbor's home to finance your drug habit, lose your job and hold your family members hostage after a five-day ice binge?
According to my irate correspondent, ice abusers are not idiots, they are addicts. More than that, the writer points out, they are people suffering from the disease of addiction. I guess if you wanted to further characterize the addicted as helpless victims, you could say they are afflicted with the disease of addiction or, better yet, say that they have contracted an affliction manifesting itself in the disease of addiction. However you put it, the message is it is not their fault if they happen to destroy their lives and the lives around them by ingesting a drug they knew, before the addiction kicked in, is dangerous and illegal.
I'M AS compassionate as the next guy. Actually, I'm not. I'm as compassionate as the guy standing three people away from the next guy or maybe the next-to-the-last guy. In any case, I might have been persuaded by the writer not to call meth users idiots if he had not told me what he thinks an idiot actually is. He believes that, basically, I am an idiot.
"Idiots come in all shapes and sizes," he said. "Many write newspaper columns where they essentially admit that they are or were idiots or at least descended from them."
So not only am I an idiot, but so are Mom and Dad and Grandpa and Grandma, etc. This salvo against my relatives came up because I suggested that until the "Don't Be A Litter Bug" campaign started half a century ago, many people thought nothing about throwing rubbish out of car windows.
"You and your family (and everyone else who littered) were the morons," he said. "Society did not 'eventually realize' littering was wrong; Non- idiots had known this all along."
To recap: I'm an idiot. My parents are idiots. Members of my family are morons. Everyone who ever littered is a moron and/or idiot. Non-litterers are "non-idiots." And people who smoke ice are not idiots (unless, I guess, they litter).
He adds that ice abusers deserve compassion. I suppose poor souls simply afflicted with the disease of being addicted to column-writing don't.
See the Columnists section for some past articles.
Charles Memminger, winner of National Society of Newspaper Columnists awards, appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. E-mail cmemminger@starbulletin.com
