Pawns or Players?
We should question and resist every call for war, especially the drug war.
I don’t write about politics, not because the topic doesn’t interest me, but because it interests me far too much. That’s all I would write about. And I’d probably lose hope for humanity if that’s all I did. However, I couldn’t resist the irony, or let’s call it the poetic coincidence of Trump’s inauguration on the day we honor Dr. Martin Luther King. With all his bluster and calls for expanding the empire, Trump hopes to remake the country, but it’s an old ploy. And not that Biden was any better. War and empire are a racket. We’re fools to believe anything different. Smedley D. Butler, a retired Marines officer, said as much back in 1935 after having fought for corporate interests across the globe:
“War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.”
Butler may have had a conversion experience or some realization that no human life is worth all the world's treasure. I don’t think we’ll see that from our next president, but it wasn’t Trump’s desire to grow the empire and “fight” drug cartels that got me thinking about this quote. It was a docuseries that reminded me that we could all be used as pawns in bigger games.
The War on Drugs is a racket and will continue to be at the expense of other countries and ordinary folk everywhere. Our lives don’t matter whether we’re innocent bystanders, drug consumers or addicts, soldiers, police officers, dealers, or traffickers. Not even the bosses of that underworld have the power to protect themselves from those pulling the strings. If you have a chance, watch The Last Narc, a docuseries that details the events that led to the murder of DEA Agent Enrique "Kiki" Camarena and the subsequent investigation. My heart broke for his widow and his children. I haven’t stopped thinking about it. You can watch it on Amazon Prime Video.
The Last Narc also made me think about the industry that has risen around drug trafficking, from gangster rap to the many films and video series it has inspired. Many of us see these as a response to reality. Still, we rarely see what manufactured that reality. Some make billions running these operations, from moving drugs on a global scale to managing prisons to manufacturing weapons. And few of us consider the hundreds of thousands of people lost to addiction or in battles for drug dealing on the other side of the world or in our cities and towns. The numbers become mind-boggling. They— who they are is not always clear—entertain, imprison, or kill people in a sick, deadly circus.
For many years now, I’ve known that the War on Drugs is a farce, but I had no idea how deep the lie goes or its darker purposes. All the stories and discussions about addiction and broken homes are of little concern to most government officials because, like most wars, the drug war is a distraction from the bigger game happening behind the scenes. That’s what the lead investigator of the Camerna case learned.
The question then becomes, how do we refuse to participate in this war? How do we protect ourselves and our families from being sucked into that storm? How do we choose to be players in our lives instead of pawns in the plans of others?
Dr. Martin Luther King resisted peacefully, and we can, too. He knew war was a racket, but did not surrender or just hope for better days. He pushed for a better world. Start at home. Keep your family from the drug war (and every other war, for that matter), and if they become entangled in that world, love them fiercely and truthfully. Fight for them because that’s the only war worth fighting.