Legalizing douchebaggery

Dear Everybody:


Legalizing pot doesn't mean you can smoke pot anytime, anywhere you want to.

If your employer has a rule about drugs and you fail a piss test, you can still be fired.  It's no different than alcohol.  You can't show up to work drunk most places, or drink at work, either (Unless you work for an advertising company in the early 60s).

You still cannot drive while under the influence.  Same as alcohol.

Tobacco is legal, but only assholes blow smoke at people or smoke in enclosed areas or right by doorways where nonsmokers can't escape it.

Rights come with responsibilities, folks.  Most folks seem to think they have every right to do whatever they please without considering the responsibilities they have to others when exercising them.

You don't have to live like a refugee

I am sick unto death of victim mentality.

Every single vile thing that a person does cannot be held against them because "you don't know their story".

I don't NEED to know the story of a person who molests a child.  I don't NEED to know the story of a person who holds up a convenience store or steals from their grandmother to support their drug habit or beats their wife.  I don't need to know all the sad woe is me that is the excuse for selling drugs and using little kids to help in that endeavour so that I have to help take care of the ten year old with a bunch of heroin in his pocket after he's been shot multiple times.

Don't care.

Know why?

Well, among other things, because you don't know MY story, either.

Because I don't trot it out as an excuse for every bad decision I ever make.  I take responsibility for my choices.  And, sometimes that's hard because I've made some really bad decisions in my past.

But, if I don't face up to my own responsibility, I will continue to screw up in the same ways over and over.

I was once well on the road to being a sorry excuse for life who whined about my lot in life and the miserable and sundry ways in which I'd been mistreated...then someone did me the favor of telling me that I don't get to use anything that happened as an excuse anymore.

"Starting today, you know that your life from here on will be determined by what you choose."

From that day, even though it wasn't a directly upward trajectory, those words and that mindset helped to frame my life and pull me out of the merry-go-round of bad decisions, the outcome of which became my new excuses.

There are many, many days still when I'd like to point an accusing finger at the things and people in my past that make me more likely to do or be X or Y, but I choose to focus on what is.  What's here in front of me now, in real life.

The result is that, though my life is not perfect, it's closer than I ever thought it could be.

And I haven't turned over control of my life to anyone else.