The Sentinel

Issue date: 5/4/09 Section: Commentary

Dear America,


There is no dispute, Johnny Cash was, in every aspect, a badass. He wore all black on stage, sang about bar fights, doing drugs, and prison. The man actually sang "Folsom Prison Blues" at Folsom Prison. His music, image, and lifestyle was that of a rough, individualistic cowboy. One who walked like a rebel and loved like the devil.

Late in Cash's career he was still producing great music. One of his last songs was titled "God's Going to Cut You Down." With stinging guitar and a hard stomping beat Cash mixes a harsh melody with pseudo-raps and chorus. His raspy, worn out voice rumbles "the rambler, the gambler, the-back-bitter, sooner or later, god'll cut you down." The man was speaking about justice. About an all-seeing creator who will administer punishment on the wicked and make them pay for their sins against the innocent. It is an ideal we all share, that those who violate the Golden Rule and do harm to others will get theirs when game is done. "You can run-on for a long time, but sooner or later god'll cut you down."

But notice Cash never mentions those who do hard drugs. He never damns the "pothead" or the "junkie," the "dealer" or the "druggie." Could it be that a man who failed to "walk the line" from time to time felt a bit of regret for the bad things he'd done? Yet in his list of ways he felt sorry, doing drugs was not one of them. Or at least he felt that even doing drugs might have been bad, it was certainly not something he thought God was going to punish him for.

However in the United States, where Cash's music is still so popular, our laws paint a different picture. We have spent billions on a "War on Drugs," yet consume billions of them every year. Our President has admitted to smoking marijuana and even doing cocaine, but he still authorizes drug raids on marijuana dealers in California where it is legal. There is a growing gap between U.S. Federal drug law and U.S. drug reality.

There seems to be a certain amount of doubt that using drugs is a real sin. We want to believe, but in fact many of us do not, that doing drugs is evil. Of course only the ones listed on the Federal banned substances list are the "real" evil ones. Other substances like rubber cement, caffeine, or even cow patties do not fit in the contemporary classification as "drugs" but are in fact different means to the same ends-getting high.

We subconsciously doubt that getting high is a sin because the only person it hurts is the user. The Golden Rule logic does not apply because other than the user, there are no other victims.

Continued...

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