By Dr. Tom, MD
After the … 2000 Presidential Election, Al Gore became an evangelist for the related causes of climate change and global warming, phenomena I’d first become aware of in the Eighties after reading that meteorologists were concerned about rising CO2 levels in air being sampled from above Hawaii’s Mona Loa volcano. Their fears were vaguely disquieting, but I soon found other issues to replace them.
Gore’s post-presidential campaign changed all that. I bought Inconvenient Truth, watched the video, and read most of the book. Since then I’ve followed weather news with increasing interest as extreme weather events have proliferated, even as the media, politicians, and many others have refused to notice.
It didn’t take long for me to become a believer in the reality of climate change; or to appreciate the ubiquity of denial as a technique for dealing with all kinds of unpleasant news.
To Al Gore’s very appropriate concerns, I’ve added a few of my own, mostly related to my own consuming interest: the insanity of American drug policy and the needless damage it inflicts on innocent people everywhere. I’ve long since decided that support for our drug policy is a litmus test for intellectual honesty: speaking out against it is the only honorable course for concerned people. That many more people oppose it than believe in it is evident from the increasing (but anonymous) support for “medical” use of cannabis, but I fear that- like appreciation of the dangers of climate change- it’s occurring way too slowly to bring about effective change.
The main reason for that admittedly dreary judgement is the sheer size of the Earth’s human population. Once one realizes how much inertia is built into our genome by behavioral traits that appear to be shared by a majority of humans, one realizes that the only “demand reduction” able to reduce our energy consumption enough to mitigate the weather damage already in our future may be rapid depopulation, a concept global political leaders are clearly unwilling to address- if they think about it at all. In the meantime, evidence that Gore is right keeps piling up…
One way to spot denial is the absence of questions that should be generated by official claims or reported facts such as: if why cannabis is so dangerous, why is it still so popular?” More evidence of pot’s appeal surfaced in affluent NY suburb when a single mom was unmasked as a very clever pot entrepreneur. What I also recognized from the article is that while her cleverness, botanical ability, and management skills seem outstanding, her childhood had been all-too similar to those experienced by many of my applicants of both genders: blighted by the emotional absence of their biological fathers.
Also typically: the absent daddy doesn’t seem evil, simply unaware of the enormous impact of his physical absence (or lack of interest) on a vulnerable young psyche.
The nugget that remains buried in my study of pot use is the critical importance of the biological father to the future emotional health of their children. I’ll be more specific in future entries
OK Dr. Tom. I used to smoke pot, occasionally and socially, I didn’t like the high it was too dulling. But I understand that we all have different chemical compositions and thus different experiences as the result of ingesting any type of chemical.
Even if those differences are subtle for some, they may be dramatic for others. That said, overall I found pot to be a rather benign drug ,compared to alcohol and do agree with you on the absurdity of our war on drugs. As we all know the war hasn’t diminished anyone’s ability to score drugs if that’s their intention and has cost society billions in enforcement and incarceration.
But before you launch into the detrimental effects of the absence of fathers, I’m sure you realize that having an abusive mother or father in the immediate presence of a child also leaves lifelong emotional scars. In a perfect world, mom and dad would be well adjusted and loving parents. But in the world we have to live in, sadly, that’s not the case. I know too many people who grew up in 2 parent families, as I’m of an advanced age and that was more the norm, that are totally screwed up people and partners as a result of that experience.
So, I believe the empirical evidence proves that even when parents divorce, if both parents are well adjusted and put their children’s best interest first, they don’t need to live under the same roof to have a perfectly positive influence on their children’s lives. And, in fact, if for whatever reason mommy and daddy have grown apart and become hostile to each other, but are able to prevent their children from witnessing that anger through separation, while still staying involved from afar, their children are better off.