🚀 go-pugleaf

R: net33: @10000 [02:19 09/09/94]
To: ORION.ALASKA.EDU #37 @10
ORION.ALASKA.EDU #37 @104 writes:

> How curious that this post arrived in the midst of a discussion of
> alcoholism in the villages of Alaska.  It makes it clear how we have made
> addiction to alcohol in and urban setting a "cool" thing with "cool" places
> to go.  The tone of this post makes it seem like the places we have made to
> go get our alcohol fix in the cities is beautiful and glamorous.  Is it
> worse that drinking is glamorized (as we do in the cities) or that it is an
> everyday event (as it may be in the villages).  So what's the difference
> here?  Why are we so eager to see and forwn upon alchololism among Natives
> in the bush, but we glamorize the places that whites go to get their
> addictive fix in the cities? Hmmm.  This post gets the award for "worst
> timing imaginable."

Whoa... back the PC truck up, Eric! While I'm not going to be so crass as to
suggest that alcoholism and alcohol in general are _not_ problems in the
hip-hop mondo-cool city environment, I am about to suggest that you're mixing
watermelons and grapes here.

Out here in the villages, alcohol is _the biggest problem_, bar none, that we
face. Each year it is the cause of more violent crimes, loss and destruction
of property, and abnormal births than you can possibly imagine. IN my village,
something like 65% of newborn children exhibit Fetal Alcohol Syndrome- and
this has been going on for at least two generations now. Statistically the
amount of damage being done by alcohol in many villages is about equal to
having full-scale armed warfare going on on every third block of your glitzy
cities.

in your glamorous city, you might know or know of, oh, one or two people who
exhibit exhibit outward signs of alcoholism. Here in the village, I can reel
off names and incidents for as long as you'd care to listen. I've patched up
their bloody wounds, listened to fantasmagoric cases of rape and sexual abuse,
fought fires caused by drunken parties, broken up those boozy fights,
performed CPR on the dying victims, and yes, carried them to the grave and
helped shovel dirt on top of them when it's all over. In all these incidents
I'm hard-pressed to think of ONE where alcohol was not involved. It's an
absolute horror which I'm fairly sure you can't comprehend without coming out
here to experience firsthand. I myself wouldn't have beleived it when I lived
out in the mainstream world. And I _still_ find myself occasionally horrified
and shocked by the depths to which it goes, hardened as I have become.


=> The three states of matter are: wackiness, dogmatism, and perversity.
=> QWK'n'Dirty 2.50, Reader and terminal program in one! (evaluation copy)