Page 8 - OCT2022

Page 8
Community
By William nieman
Earlier that evening, stars had enlivened the dark sky, but I could no longer see them. Blood had coated my eyes. I wiped them and caught a glimpse of a police officer. He was looking down at me and asking questions that stirred me to consciousness. I began to recall what had taken place. My friend and I had been drinking a lot of beer. We were drunk. The car had swerved off the road into a ditch. We were thrown against the windshield. Our heads had struck the metal strip securing the glass of the MG convertible. We would soon wear identical scars that stretched from our foreheads several inches through our left eyelids with foolish pride. How- ever, in the moments after the ac- cident, there would be no pride,
NEWFOUNDLAKELIFE.COM October 2022 Alcohol, Drugs, and Karma - Part 1
only fear. I would pray fervently for God to spare my life. A year later, my friend with the match- ing scar would again drink too much. I was not riding with him this time. He was alone. The next crash was horrific. He would lose the scar, his head, his life. He was decapitated.
For me, that star-stolen eve- ning in 1959 was an end to inno- cence. In a metaphorical sense, it was the endpoint for our soci- ety’s decade of innocence. It is of great concern to me to reflect on alcohol and drug abuse in that decade because of the ap- parent tranquility of those years compared to the turmoil of this millennium. True enough, the first half of the 1950s witnessed a war in Korea, and the second half was stirred by the initial steps of black Americans in their
march to freedom. The Korean War always seemed far away, and the Civil Rights movement of that decade was highlighted by the positive heroism of the likes of Rosa Parks and the up- lifting Gandhian homilies of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King. Cultural icons of those years reflected the relatively modest breaches of societal de- corum. Elvis Presley’s gyrations and the suggestive hip swinging prompted by the hula hoop were greeted with some embarrass- ment by the staid adult genera- tion. Only the noisy beat writers seemed to challenge the moral conformity of the times. In other words, for the most part, rebel- lious teenagers like me were truly without a cause, as was the case of our Hollywood hero, James Dean. The scary thing about
these days is that, unlike the rel- atively tranquil days of my teen- age years, today’s decade is rife with reasons and opportunities for rebellion, and specifically the abuse of alcohol and drugs.
The society of the four de- cades concluding the twentieth century is so full of paradoxes that one must be careful with generalizations, but it is safe to say that the decades from 1960 to 2000 contrast dramatically with the 1950s, a decade of im- portant achievements in science and medicine, but also one best known for conformity and sated with consumerism. The contrasts were most striking in the decade following the 1950s. The sub- sequent decade was turbulent. It was a time of assassinations, war, protests against the war, festivals of peace and love, and a dramatic increase in the use of marijuana. Many of the cul- tural developments that occurred in the remaining decades of the 20th century can trace their seminal moments to the 1960s. These include “women’s liber- ation,” which led to the Roe vs. Wade decision of the 1970s, and the outing of a previously invisi- ble gay population with episodes like the raid on the Stonewall bar
in 1968. Additionally, and most relevant to our story, these con- cluding decades of the 20th cen- tury bore the proliferating fruit of the drug culture rooted in the 1960s.
The increase in the use of drugs had many causes. One of these was the return of thou- sands of Vietnam veterans who had needed the balm of drugs to comfort them as they expe- rienced the bizarre horrors of an unwinnable war in an alien world. There was also a prolifer- ation of advocacy for hallucino- gens by writers and academics, the likes of Ken Kesey and Tim- othy Leary. In the 1980s, cocaine was becoming the country’s drug of choice. For the rich, it took on the unlikely effect of a status symbol. For the poor of the ghet- tos, “crack,” a smokable form of cocaine provided an escape from the doldrums of poverty. Drug abuse had become so endemic that America’s political leaders declared a “war on drugs . This effort would include strict, pu- nitive enforcement of drug laws domestically and an attempt to destroy the drug cartels of Co- lumbia, Bolivia, and Peru. Amer- ica’s leaders had taken the words of Bolivian secretary of the inte-
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