Future Hampden County sheriff should consider Griffin’s message on addictionDate: 7/8/2016 And then there were five. The news that Hampden County Sheriff candidate Jack Griffin has dropped out of the race and endorsed Springfield City Councilor Thomas Ashe surprised many, especially in light of Griffin’s impassioned performance at the debate conducted by the Greater Springfield NAACP.
Griffin may not be a candidate any longer, but his message for greater emphasis on addiction treatment as part of the mission of the Sheriff’s Department for the long-term control of crime in the county is one that should not be ignored.
Whoever wins in November should find either a place for Griffin in the new administration or make his message a priority of his own. Breaking the hold of addiction is paramount.
A Grand Old Flag
July Fourth musings after looking at Facebook feed: So let me get this straight: a guy burning the American flag out of protest is “desecrating” the symbol of our country and should be punished, but an attractive young woman wearing a flag bikini is acceptable?
I’m not in favor of flag burning, but I doubt the Founding Fathers would have approved of the flag as apparel, especially an item of clothing such as that – except for Ben Franklin, of course. History tells us he was a bit of a dog. Franklin remains, as the Firesign Theater once said, the “only president of the United States who was never president of the United States.”
Asking the obvious
Second Fourth of July musing: I had never heard of Mark Dice, who is a conspiracy theorist and upon greater examination I may not agree with some of his theories, but I was impressed with a video he produced of simply asking people in a beach community apparently in southern California what was the meaning of the Fourth of July.
It’s up on YouTube. Just search for “Mark Dice.”
The answers to his questions were not amusing but rather infuriating. Are people so stupid that they don’t understand even a Cliff’s Notes version of American history?
The answer is apparently “yes.”
Dice used a simple formula for his video, one that comedian Jay Leno and Jimmy Kimmel have used: go to a public place and ask people you see a question with what many people would believe is an apparent answer.
One young woman admitted she had no idea from which country we declared our independence by saying she had slept through her history class. Another person thought the Fourth of July originally took place in 1870s at some point.
After viewing this video I wondered if the morons in my neighborhood who were lighting off fireworks or the neighbors who decided to try to close off part of the street in order to have a party could answer Dice’s questions.
I’m willing to bet the answer would be “no.”
At a time in which information is at our fingertips through incredible advances in technology, the irony is that I think many people today are more ignorant than the previous generation that did not have the advantages of computers, tablets and computers with Internet connections.
Of course the real question during this crucial election year is whether or not any of these people vote and what is their process to determine their support.
One of my journalistic gods, Ambrose Bierce defined “vote” in his classic “The Devil’s Dictionary” as “the instrument and symbol of a freeman’s power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.”
This column is the opinion of its author and does not necessarily reflect the position of the owners or advertisers of this newspaper. Got a comment about this story? Go to http://speakout.thereminder.com and let us know.
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