Oh Come Let Us Adore Iced Coffee

I took my morning constitutional (to go and get an iced coffee) at a shop where Oh Come Let Us Adore Him was piping out. If I'm to be used as a benchmark, most men struggle with the high-pitched key changes in that carol. Actually, that's true of most Christmas carols [shudders at memories of trying to sing 'Gloorrooorrroooorrroooorrrroooorrrriaaaaa' during Ding Dong Merrily on High].

I found somewhere to get a haircut as my mop was decisively ballooning. I was told 'hair getting white now', which was an overly dramatic description. The hairdresser was from the Philippines so it didn't take long for President Duterte to crop up in conversation. I saw a recent article that the President's 'war on drugs' (the killing of addicts on the streets) had now claimed more than 5,000 lives. When I said I didn't feel this was the greatest solution, the hairdresser disagreed, claiming that 70% of the population of Manila was afflicted by drug addiction. This cannot objectively be true but I didn't want to argue too vociferously whilst he was operating very close to my neck with a razor blade. 

I don't want to live in a world where the solution to drug addiction is to kill those affected rather than understand and tackle the systemic reasons behind it. When I voiced that murdering addicts wasn't the most humane solution, the hairdresser's response was 'what about drug addicts who rape a one year old baby?' 

This is a classic example of the way different value systems emerge during a debate. People with extreme views against another group using the absolute worst example to justify their prejudice against the entire group; the most obvious example being the labelling of all Muslims as terrorists, which is such a laughably ignorant position. 

There is always an extreme example of anything you could think of, given the complexity of our world. It's very disingenuous to debate using the most outlandish statement and ultimately I want to know what positive values people think they are adhering to when they support a policy to kill addicts rather than support them in some other way. I have various theories:

- the ugliest of the human competitive streak which would try to deny the successful rehabilitation and potential later success of people currently struggling
- the complacency that prevents people from thinking they could ever be in such a disadvantageous position, and the associated lack of empathy
- that people simply aren't interested in supporting change when they believe the status quo doesn't affect them
 
In the case of Duterte's anti-drug policy, what about the drug addicts who are trying to rehabilitate but their lives are so chaotic that they can't find the stability to do so? What about a woman whose husband has died, and she's found herself on the street and turned to drugs for comfort and shoplifting to feed her children? Nope, better erase them from the planet.

In simple economic terms, yes it may ultimately cost more to treat people humanely and to look for the positive contribution of each, but shouldn't that be a mark of this civilisation that we seem to be so proud of? How does anything ever change for the good with a policy such as this?

Ah. The familiar feeling of being on leave with more time than usual to consider the state of the world. In January I was holidaying alone and remember plunging into despair about US politics. And that's hardly become better throughout the year...