A Humpty-Dumpty World

It's kind of a social conundrum. A tricky one. One that leaves more questions than answers. What's normal and not normal in our post-modern society of liberal-social-progressive thought and sensibilities in a truly pluralist society?

Take, for example, illegal recreational drug use. When it's done by celebrities, high-paid performers, singers, actors, it's cool; they're relaxing, that's what recreation is all about, isn't it? When it's done by politicians we hardly know about it, because they're discreet about their mode of recreational ease. And they will scarcely go about informing their constituents that they're hooked on feeling good, now will they?

And then there are high-powered business types, CEOs, that kind of public-private persona, getting away from the stress of the job.

Alcohol, drugs, take your pick, they're both addictive, they're both very capable of destroying a life. Moderation, of course, is the key to controlling one's habit, but moderation is difficult to achieve when free choice has been made to use a mind-altering drug that will control you, not you control its use. Famously, but quietly, medical professionals, under pressure and with drugs so readily accessible, find themselves addicted to drugs.

Their profession morally and professionally mandates they be in control.

If a surgeon is in the operating room and he's under the influence of drugs, how reliant can a patient be -- oblivious to the state their seemingly capable doctor may be struggling with -- that they will emerge from a serious operation that will most certainly forever alter their lives, positively or negatively. And nurses, when doling out specific medications in very specific amounts to patients; how capable are they when they're not in their right mind thanks to the ingestion of drugs?

But these are the responsible, respected, highly-motivated, socially accepted members of society. They're not the down-and-out, the poorly-waged living in seedy neighbourhoods where they and their offspring indulge in illegal drugs use to defray the misery of their lives. A dirty habit that society condemns them for and the police look out for, prepared to arrest and charge and appear in court to give witness in  criminal court proceedings.

And where does someone like Rob Ford, Mayor of Toronto, fall in this catalogue of equal ethical and moral failures, but condemned outright and susceptible to criminal charges in the underworld of the poor and the marginalized and the criminal element of society, but skirted around in the discreet use by respected members of society?

Come to that, there are members of society who are outright condemned for their choice of lifestyle and working habits. Working girls commonly referred to as prostitutes, whores or sluts live a dangerous lifestyle, exposing themselves to dire sexually transmitted medical conditions and equally worrisome, violence at the hands of some of their johns. Those johns are all right, though, since many of them are representative of the same level of societal respect as the bankers and physicians who use drugs.

And then, there's the equality in human rights entitlements given to the peculiarity of the cross-gendered, those who are sexually attracted to same-gendered lovers and who, though once horribly persecuted and exposed to a violent backlash from 'normal' gendered heterosexuals, are now given a stamp of societal and legal approval through the absurdity of 'same-sex' marriage, preferred over the legality of civil union protections.

Where two women exchange sacred vows of the marriage rites, and where two men will do the same. The women may prefer to consider one another 'husbands', while the men may consider one of the pair to represent the 'wife', while the other is the 'husband'. The real question here is why would homosexuals insist that they be entitled to the sacraments of a social institution specifically geared to heterosexual bonds?

A former Ontario provincial Member of Parliament who performed abysmally at the profession of politician by making errors and decisions that cost the taxpayer grief, felt sufficiently confident in his lifestyle and orientation to openly present as the 'wife' in a longstanding union with a man considered the 'husband', (counter-intuitively, the husband a much smaller man than the wife), and who was content to be a 'stay-at-home' father to two adopted infants until he finally succeeded after a number of attempts in committing suicide.

Society seeing little amiss in what certainly appears to be a dysfunctional setting for two small and vulnerable children, patterning themselves on the lifestyles of their 'parents'; their 'father' and their 'mother'.