Although use of illegal drugs among teens has declined slightly over the past several years, mostly due to aggressive anti-drug campaigns and law enforcement, no one would deny that Illinois has an alarming problem with drug and substance abuse.  According to the Illinois Consortium on Drug Policy, the number of incarcerated drug offenders in our state has increased 2,748 percent since 1983.  
    In addition to the incalculable damage done to individuals, families, and communities, Illinois taxpayers spend over $260 million to incarcerate drug offenders every year.  More alarming than that, “Illinois ranks second only to California in the number of individuals incarcerated for drug offenses,” the Illinois Consortium revealed in their Intersecting Voices study of 2006.
    Nationwide, twice as much money ($12.6 vs. $6.1 billion) is spent on drug law enforcement than on education and prevention programs.  While throwing money at a problem is rarely the solution, these numbers reflect the general attitude our society takes towards the problem of drug and substance abuse.  It is a responsive, rather than a proactive, system.
    In order to find a proactive solution to the drug and substance abuse problem in Illinois, we have to understand the roots of the problem and change our culture to reduce the desire for drugs.  Why do people use drugs?  Boredom, social pressures, addiction, and lack of parental guidance (or even parental consent) may all be contributing factors.  
    Using the law of parsimony, more popularly known as Occam’s razor, we can shave off the complex and often theoretically laden jargon used by social scientists to explain increasing drug use in America today.  “Drugs” are chemical substances that alter the normal, functioning state of an organism.  A human being intentionally ingests drugs because he or she seeks to alter his or her normal, functioning state.  Simply put, he or she wishes to “feel differently.”  Most people who are happy or content do not want to feel differently.  Therefore, people take drugs because they are not happy or content.
    Case in point: the lifetime, nonmedical use of pain relievers among persons aged 12 or older in the United States has risen in recent years to over 31 million people, or around 12 percent of that age-specific population.  Individuals who use pain relievers either are or perceive themselves to be in chronic pain.  Likewise, individuals use drugs because they are unsatisfied, depressed, or disappointed with their situation in life.
    When I was growing up, my parents set a good example by both never partaking of illegal drugs or abusing legal ones, and also by taking an active interest in my well being.  Whenever I was upset or felt depressed, my father took me jogging, fishing, or to the race track.  He spent time with me.  Although I suffered from a lot of emotional problems stemming from my school life, the thought of turning to illegal drugs or alcohol to relieve my problems never even occurred to me.
    My experiences have led me to believe that the best prevention is not drug education, and it is certainly not scare tactics or incarceration; it begins in the home and in the community.  Children must have a tight network of friends and family who support them.  Recovering drug users must not be ostracized from the community, but incorporated into the community.  Above all, public events, games, and celebrations must be held frequently.  Give your neighbors reasons to believe that there are other people who look out for their welfare, and that they are not just drones crammed into schools or dead end jobs.
    The danger of drug enforcement rather than drug prevention is that the arms of the community are being rapidly replaced by the arms of the state prison system, the new home for nearly 13,000 Illinois residents convicted of drug related offenses.  Prison sentences for drug offenses not only break up families and isolate individuals from the community, but the stigma of a criminal conviction can only lead to emotional hopelessness and isolation, which are strong motivations for further drug use.
    If we continue our current course, the drug problem in Illinois will not go away in the perceivable future.  We can either continue to bandage it, hide it through incarceration, or we can plant the seeds of a healthier family and community life that will hopefully reduce the root causes of drug and substance abuse.  No one is going to solve this problem for us.  The choice is ours and ours alone.

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    National borders define the territorial limits of sovereign nations, and those nations have the right to secure and control their borders.  Every nation, state, tribe, and kingdom since the dawn of time has demarcated territory and boundaries and reserved the right to defend them from other tribes or nations.
    Yet some in the United States feel that right no longer exists, and that protecting our territorial integrity is fundamentally unconscionable.  These same people chastised both Yugoslavia and Macedonia for justly resisting secessionist claims by ethnic Albanians who sought to carve out their own autonomous zones and attach them to their Albanian motherland throughout the late 1990s.  Similar forms of irredentism and separatism have been two of the primary challenges to national sovereignty in the past few decades.
    Although dozens of comparable examples can be found all around the world, the Balkan mess is a good forewarning for what is increasingly likely to happen in the southwestern United States, where millions of Mexican immigrants have colonized large areas they consider to be theirs by right, even though they lost those lands during the 1840s.  
    Many in the United States have turned a blind eye to this situation, even when the border town of El Cenizo, Texas declared Spanish its official language in 1999, or when the president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, Mario Obledo, claimed, “California is going to be a Mexican state… if people don’t like it, they should leave.”
    And what reason should this new immigrant population, much larger than any in the past history of immigration to the US, located adjacent to their country of origin, and with historic grievances against the United States, have for assimilation or even consideration of United States sovereignty, when these actions and words go uncontested?
    In that context, a blanket amnesty for the millions of illegal Mexican immigrants in the US would only encourage this behavior in those, like Mr. Obledo, who would use it to further their divisive political agenda.
    We are without question failing in our duty to protect our sovereignty, which includes the absolute right to say who can come across our border and for how long.  Setting a firm and resolute immigration policy to prevent the disintegration of large areas of our territory is not ‘nativist’ and it is not racist.  It is our right as a country to exert supreme political and lawful authority over the territory under our control. 

    Christmas is in the air--at least in the bowels of our national retailers.  As I perused the museum of popular culture (Wal-mart) recently, I discovered that as of October 20th Halloween items were on clearance and store associates were erecting artificial Christmas trees.  Thanksgiving seems to have gotten lost in the transition.
    As I gazed at the product display, I wondered at what point Christmas became less about eating a ham with your family near the warmth of a crackling fire and more about trampling someone for a $30 DVD player.
    Bill O’Reilly speaks of a “war on Christmas” as if the commercialization of the holiday is a recent phenomenon.  The “war on Christmas” has been going on ever since someone decided to link the idea of American progress and happiness with orgiastic spending and greed.  But it is not an atheistic conspiracy to wipe Jesus from the culture that is behind this phenomenon?it is the breakdown of tradition and the crumbling of the gemeinschaft; a deeply rooted, organic sense of community.
    In our technocratic age, when social alienation has become an art form and everything is available at the swipe of a plastic card, the satisfaction of the desire for possessions overcomes the desire for a sense of social acceptance or the strengthening of familial ties.
    In many areas of the country the celebration of holidays like Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas have moved from public spaces into places where merchandise is bought and where merchandise is consumed.  On Halloween, for example, I see more decorations inside of stores than outside of houses.  Parents today drive their children from house to house, walk them to the door and then bring them home to feast on their rewards.  Gone are the days when large groups wandered the neighborhood, collectively engaged in the holiday.
    Likewise, Santa Claus is more often identified with a trip to the mall than a parade or a surprise visit at home.  Surrounded by piles of toys and glittering lights, he lures the children in so that their parents will buy?buy?buy.
    It goes without saying that certain aspects of these holidays will always be about consumption.  It would be difficult (and not very fun) to celebrate them without any of the accoutrements, but to make profit the sum total of the holiday is a travesty.
    All holidays, everywhere, are fundamentally about forging and solidifying social bonds.  They are about shared traditions and cultural experience.  They give the community a common identity.
    But these fundamentals are endangered when holidays become just one more means to an end:  $$.

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    In December of 1981, Britney J. Spears came into this world in the deep southern state of Mississippi to working class professional parents.  In what seemed like a realization of the American dream, she appeared on Star Search in 1992 when she was only 11 years old and later joined the New Mickey Mouse Club with future boyfriend Justin Timberlake and fellow diva Christina Aguilera.  Jive Records picked up her demo tape when she was 16 and only a year later, she was singing “hit me baby one more time” dressed in a suggestively redesigned Catholic schoolgirl uniform in the halls of the same high school where the classic American movie Grease was filmed.  
    After selling 76 million albums around the world, staring in her own feature film, and gracing the cover of hundreds of magazines, her career collapsed at the ripe old age of 23.  A few months ago I sat and stared in bewilderment from behind my computer screen as Spears, two marriages and two children later, opened her legs to the paparazzi while giving them the ‘thumbs up’ during a night on the town with Paris Hilton.
    Then it occurred to me that the rise and fall of Britney Spears revealed the fundamental problems with American consumerism, from her contradictory roots as a Christian conservative, to her bubblegum sexuality, all the way down to the implosion of her personal life.  The pursuit of profit and the reduction of all value to performance in the marketplace has characterized our lives since the late 1950s, but my generation was the first to be baptized in the total submersion of this culture.  
    Corporations now cultivate entertainers from a very early age to be marketed to the public, who are harvested for their financial resources like a forest is clearcutted to grind and slice into raw materials.  Britney Spears was not a human being to Walt Disney and her producer Max Martin, she was a product to be marketed, sold, and subjected to planned obsolescence so that she expired when Jive Records found a newer, fresher product to sell to the masses.
    The Britney Spears culture transforms art into a commodity and makes human happiness reducible to the consumption of merchandise.  Britney Spears’ music, like all popular art characteristic of this culture, appeals to the lowest common denominator for maximum marketability.  But there are no redeeming qualities in this process.  As revealed by Spears’ tragic personal life, our consumer culture is destructive of human social relations, as the marketplace takes all precedence over every aspect of our lives.
    Britney Spears unwittingly represents the very worst of American culture, but in the end, as her song says, “I’m a Slave 4 U.”

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“The less government interferes with private pursuits the better for the general prosperity.”
   —Martin Van Buren

     The problem that I see with many “reform” movements in the United States today is that they are, for lack of a better phrase, all talk and no action.  Their members are content to simply complain about a situation and then sit around and wait for someone to come and save them, usually politicians.
    Let me say this clearly and directly: if you are waiting for someone else to do the work for you then you will be waiting for quite some time.  In order to achieve any meaningful results, we must do the work ourselves.
    Multinational corporations have run roughshod over Middle America; ruining town after town, building sprawl and paving over forests, fields, and farmland while you have been glued to the TV watching American Idol.
    I am not asking you to hold signs, commit to boycotts, or write letters – none of which work any-more – but I am asking you to put your time and money where your mouth is.  If you want to see more local businesses stay open, spend your money at them.  Start a local business.  Yes, you – the retired man or woman with plenty of cash on hand and nothing to spend it on.  Why not use that money to open a business and live the American dream?
    The solution to our economic problems is not more government interference and regulation; it is less interference and more enforcement.  Local and state governments spend your tax money to subsidize their corporate friends, while turning a blind eye to corporate improprieties.  Meanwhile, they ignore the struggling, independently owned American business.
    If the playing field were leveled, national retailers such as Wal-Mart, which rely on government funds to subsidize their growth, low prices, and low wages, would be unable to compete with local businesses.  When a Wal-Mart wants to build a new parking lot, the city often pays the bill.  How many times has the city offered to pay for a new lot for your business?  These improvements – new lots, new roads in some cases – all cost money, money that the city hardly ever recoups.  That was money that came out of your pocket.
    Wal-Mart can afford to operate at a profit loss at locations all across America – you can’t.
    So get off the couch and do something.
    Overall, these columns are geared toward convincing you to take more responsibility for your own life and the life of the community around you.  Political parties and interest groups, though they have their place, only serve to divide us.  We cannot afford to be divided over these issues.  The future depends on it.
    Have a stiff upper lip.  Tighten your belt and get to work.  Only the time-tested spirit of hard work and self-denial will save our communities from disaster.