Progress Slower Than A Snail
Connor Strange
Staff Writer
In the fifteen years of my life, I haven’t exactly gathered all of the wisdom that there is to be had. I’m still naive at times, and I try too hard to be mature in other instances.
However, I have noticed one thing to be true through the veil of my adolescent ignorance: much-needed progress is made far too slowly.
On a nationwide scale, changes are birthed with lumbering, lurching movements. Even though America’s people have a want for political transition in a major way, the government can’t initiate the necessary progress.
The changes that need to be made are innumerable, but a few big and obvious ones are still not in place. One of the issues in the forefront of debate is gay marriage.
It boggles the mind as to why homosexuals have yet to obtain the marital rights of hetero couples in all of the United States. The denial of happiness to these individuals is amoral, to say the least. For some infuriating reason, the government is still highly saturated with people who are adverse to legalizing gay marriage simply because of their religious viewpoints. Not only that, but it’s full-up of people who think that their beliefs should stand in the way of others’. I must have missed the memo about electing children into political office.
Un-American is the phrase most fitting to the problem, I find. The U.S. was founded upon the ideas of freedom from religious oppression, and what else would the denial of human rights based upon religion be called? Separation of church and state happened quite a while ago, yet the religious views of our politicians still weigh down the system. Gay marriage isn’t the only topic debate that should already be won, though.
Marijuana’s legalization is one of the other largest problems in the States, seeing as it is a no-brainer to decriminalize the drug. Pot is practically harmless when contrasted against other illegal drugs, and it’s even less harmful than alcohol and cigarettes. Alcohol’s intoxicating effects outweigh marijuana’s effects, while excess consumption can cause serious liver damage. Studies overwhelmingly show that cannabis is not habit-forming, whereas the nicotine in cigarettes can cause a seemingly unbreakable addiction, not to mention the extensive health detriments caused by chain smoking.
Cannabis could also be a massive source of tax dollars for the government, if they were to tax legally distributed marijuana. That would drive dealers out of business, and decriminalization would free people put into the prison system for pot affiliation (which is a ridiculous overexaggeration). Its drawbacks are insignificant compared to much of what is legal today.
Other issues are always present and are still being argued over: abortion, war and bears, oh my. More heated debates will continue to crop up as technology advances. All I’m asking is for a fix to problems that should have been solved decades before I was born.
