Both sides now

As goes Michigan, so goes America. One resident asks, "Against what unspeakable pain are so many desperate Americans self-medicating?" This reference to the drug problem, misses the point about the self-imposed drug epidemic. Pleasure, not pain initially drives drug addiction. One’s personal prejudice usually explains the cause of a problem. Atheists have explained away evil over the centuries. The Michigan man comes to the issue of drugs from his perspective too. He thinks something is terrible wrong with America to cause so much self-medication; he doesn’t see that too life is too easy and too much is wrong in our culture to allow for drug abuse.

Then there’s the Michigan woman who decries the "cost of an unplanned pregnancy stress on a family with no job, no health insurance, home foreclosure threatened, a child or more needing care and no money for birth control." From her perspective as a liberal, she lies about reality to explain the need to restrict number of children. Of course, she does not see that the poor themselves want their children but no job, no health insurance or no payment of a mortgage is a result of reckless budgeting of resources. Also, what does a "child or more needing care really mean? Why cannot a woman afford a few cents for birth control pills? Her agenda drives her conclusion that fewer children are better because she says so and government should facilitate it.
As two Michigan residents get it wrong, so do many other Americans. Reality might be a prickly thing, but its taste is ultimately sweeter than the perpetual lie. The self-inflicted problems of drugs and poverty are the results of moral failures. For some people, these issues will never go away. America’s job - the job of a good society - should be to minimize their negative consequences.