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Here’s to you, Mr. Charles Dickens. It is ineluctably true that these are the best of times; at the same time, these are the worst of times. One does not have to be a Cornville-based Orwellian double-thinker to clasp that paradox. Consider that Americans have been all the way to the Moon and back, yet Sedona’s citizens, city staffers and council folks cannot agree about lights on Hwy 89A. What’s true all the more so is that we’ve learned to rush, but not to wait; we elect leaders that talk of safety, law and order, yet residential streets in uptown Sedona are crammed with speeding cars – rarely police cars— and stop signs run routinely; all the while, we’ve conquered the atom but not our prejudices; we have more knowledge, but less judgment.
What’s more, notes Dr. Moorehead, a onetime Seattle pastor, “We talk too much, love too seldom and hate too often.” Sounds like the splinter group of a once powerful conservation organization—The Sahara Club in Ed Abbey’s opinion—that preaches of sustainability yet lobbies against Sedona’s first sustainable project.
Pundits and polls tell us that we are a divided nation. Our current mayor believes the town is divided. A onetime Sedona developer, reportedly now on the lam in Europe, complained as he fled that the problem is that too Sedonans have points of view.
Is there an antidote for all the whining about whether these are the best of times; the worst of times? Will it take a massive new federal program to unite us?
Out there somewhere is there a man (or woman) on a white horse, a true American Idol, totally committed to doing whatever it takes to bring us together now that Johnny Carson is off the air, Reagan has departed for the great beyond, Cronkite is in Scottsdale, and The Honeymooners are not speaking?
While politicians endlessly bloviate about the notion of freedom and liberty, more and more people are taking a trip to a WalMart . Besides happiness pills for less than one pays for a Latte Grande at Desert Flour, one may purchase a tiny plastic cup. For what, you ask? Well, you can’t ask The Man anymore, but it was President Reagan who fired the starting gun: Welcome to Urine Nation. Until Reagan signed an Executive Order mandating drug testing for all Federal employees, tiny plastic cups were the sole province of methadone clinics, law enforcement agencies and Kool-Aid stands. To underscore the significance of Reagan’s act, and to set an example, his Veep, G.H.W. Bush, reportedly went beyond the call and filled two bottles with his aristocratic wee wee, then sent it off to a Navy hospital somewhere. Results have never been revealed.
Voices of protest were raised, but the root had been planted, growing faster than civil libertarians ever imagined, at least as fast indeed as a dog can lick a dish. Two years later, more cups were needed when the Congress, maneuvering on quiet cats' feet, moved legislation which required any company—large or small - to maintain a drug-free workplace. Make no bones about that direction, senators and congressmen wailed, for those that don’t obey the new law would surely lose government contracts.
While civil libertarians slept, even corporations without government contracts started passing out plastic cups. By 1996 more than 80 percent of big businesses, according to the drug-free American Management Association, demanded drug testing of some kind.
According to highly-placed and sober sources, including the little read Reason Magazine, workplace drug-testing is now a billion-dollar business—and millions of people have one thing in common at last. How clever our own government can be from time to time. For it is our very own U.S. government that has outsourced drug testing to the private sector, thereby bypassing the Fourth amendment. And, forty million drug tests, according to researcher Greg Beato, at an average of $30-35 per test, translate into a $1.2 billion subsidy Uncle Sam pulls in from the private sector annually to help continue the war on drugs. Needless to say, a black market of sorts has emerged. Some guy in the mid-west has come up with a Whizzinator (fake penis, harness, synthetic urine, heating pad). If caught one faces 180-days in the slammer. Three hundred thousand have been sold as of this writing. Others think they’ve found ways to avoid law and order. Not long ago, a southern chap got six months in jail for selling his urine over the Internet. Must close now. Someone is knocking on my door.