Rage

Underlying my intolerable negative emotions is not really sadness.  Often depression is characterized as a kind of extreme form of sadness, but that doesn't mean that depressed people are sad or that their underlying problem is that things make them sad.

One of John Campbell's suggested titles for an essay about why you like the way things currently are is:

Hello drug dealer in prison, I bought this weed I’m smoking from you, and my friend over there just started selling weed legally. Try to make the best of your time in there okay.

Our drug policies are not okay.  If you catch me in a conversation about them, I will typically talk about how drug laws have been ineffective at curtailing the use of drugs and about how they have led to the rise of organized crime.  I will talk about how, as a matter of fact, drug laws work against their supposed intended purpose.  I will say that people who support our current drug laws are disingenuous or stupid.

And that's all true.  But how I really feel is that drug laws are an insanely cruel product of a system that just doesn't care about anyone who is branded an outsider.  And it doesn't even matter if they have been branded and outsider by an arbitrary rule of the system itself.  People who argue in favour of drug laws seem to argue that drugs are wrong because they are illegal and they are illegal because they are wrong.  An entitled jerk whose name I don't care to look up right now wrote an editorial for the Wall Street Journal or some other publication starting with W about how he did drugs when he was young but it wasn't really good for his character and so America should continue incarcerating young men by the thousands.  He didn't exactly put it that way, but that is a very charitable reading.

I would like to see all law makers who support criminal drug laws and who have used illegal drugs immediately incarcerated for the average sentence for possession of that drug so they could come out of prison and tell us how useful that exercise was.  But that is tempering my rage into a practical suggestion.

I would like to lead a revolt to overthrow the government and execute those who pass laws from which they hold themselves exempt.  But even that is really just giving a rational story to an emotional reaction.

Underlying my intolerable negative emotions is rage.  I want to smash and destroy.  I want to hurt, kill and reduce to ash.  I want to explode.  To know that I can't, and that in fact there would be no point in doing so, that is depression.