Prohibition Is ‘Loko’

Here in New York, while our infrastructure crumbles, our city and state governments go broke, schools fail, crime increases, and unemployment remains high, our political leaders busied themselves engaged in modern-day prohibition and forced an alcoholic beverage off the shelves.

Store owners have until Dec. 10 to sell whatever Four Loko they have left. The beverage, which contains generous helpings of alcohol and caffeine, has been called “blackout in a can,” by drinking aficionados and moralizing politicians. Several other states have moved to ban the drink and others like it.

Without getting into the argument against the ban on alcohol for people under 21, the more recent problem of young people harming themselves with these drinks could be solved by enforcement of already existing laws. Also, now that it has been outlawed, stores are going to sell out of Four Loko fast, and more kids will be encouraged to drink it to see what the fuss is about.

Somewhere people are hard at work thinking of the next legal way for people to annihilate their brain cells, because people will buy products that get them drunk and/or high. They always have, always will. You can outlaw anything you want; people are going to find new ways to fuck themselves up. Have faith in the powers of human invention and the drive to escape reality. A year or two from now, the government will ban something new.

Also, doesn’t it occur to anyone in government that Americans have the right to be drunken idiots? It’s our right to poison ourselves slowly with tobacco, alcohol or (in my case) caffeine. So long as it’s not poisonous or fraudulently labeled, the government should not interfere with our right to drink disgusting drinks until we puke ourselves.

Do not give one inch on anything. If it’s legal today, make sure it stays legal. Yesterday it was clove cigarettes. Today it’s Four Loko and similar drinks. Tomorrow it will be double cheeseburgers. They’ll pry a bottle of Diet Pepsi from my cold, dead fingers.

Smart Phones Do Not Make Smarter People

Bowing to the demands of the modern age, which accelerates in its adaption of new technologies at an exponential rate, I recently became one of the last of my friends to upgrade to a “smart” phone.

I am not at all what technology experts call an “early adopter” of technology. I would have been fine to do without a cell phone, except that everyone insisted on using them and I got tired of looking like some kind of crack head bum in search of a working pay phone.

The term “early adopter” refers to people so obsessed by technology that they will wait in line for six hours to spend too much on a piece of technology that will be obsolete in two weeks. Were you one of the first on your block to own an iPhone? Congratulations, you’re an idiot. The iPhones are becoming obsolete faster than they can make them, and one of the newer versions was plagued with problems.

I had planned on holding out for at least another year before buying a smart phone. I thought that maybe the prices would go down some more or technology would improve somehow just enough to make the added expense negligible. But I relented under peer pressure and an attractive brochure in the mail.

Improved technology has created a convenient universe of irresponsibility. The convenience of communication has devalued that communication. It no longer matters for many people to be on time for meetings or events. They figure that if they send you a text message around the time they were supposed to meet you, it is the same as showing up. Since technology exists for our convenience, people think everyone and everything else exists for their convenience also. Cell phones and Internet-capable hand-held devices have only further discouraged people from planning ahead, which is not a good thing. If anything, we as a society do not spend nearly enough time on thinking ahead.

Texting is one of the most despicable forms of communication available today, and is used with great fervor by the younger generation (the younger generation today includes anyone who graduated high school after 1995). I absolutely refuse to use the shorthand that is so common among texters (e.g.: - r u going 2 bed? – OMG, me 2!), as this is the language of cretins and pre-pubescent girls. And as someone who prides himself on decent writing, I want to use proper capitalization and punctuation at all times, things that texting on a regular cell phone makes very difficult to do at all and impossible to do quickly. I was content to do without texting, but too many people insist upon doing it, and I had to get an unlimited texting plan lest my phone bill be too high.

The smart phone should enable me to send text messages without losing my mind. So far, instead of making errors by not hitting the right button the requisite number of times, I’m making errors by hitting the wrong buttons on the very small screen keyboard. Technology is always finding new ways of improving your life while at the same time annoying the shit out of you.