Tom Mix wrote:
I could imagine that a junkie who takes some old lady's purse to buy heroin is victimizing the old lady, but is a student smoking marijuana and drinking a beer victimizing anyone? What about a heroin junkie who is rich, though unpopular, and never committed any other crime? Have they made themselves a victim of something? Maybe so...the needle, the darkness, the overwhelming Love Which Cannot Be Real. But the state shouldn't recognize "mystical entities" like this as perpetrators. The person in this case is making a choice; they will do no harm but to themselves. Are they then a victim, or a perpetrator, or both?
-- Excerpt from "Victim" (c) County Mountie Productions -- {Passage sung by purse snatcher who is mugging little old lady.} "I knocked her dowm, stepped on her face, Slandered her name all over the place. Hit her with my fist, kicked her with my shoe, "I said, "Lady, I'm a victim. A victim, just like you. I'm a victim of a Bad Attitude." -- When this song was recorded, it was somewhat tragically ironic, but it proved to be prophetic. I believe that "Bad Attitude" is now a recognized psychiatric illness, allowing one a reduced sentence and monetary support from the government while the poor victim of "Bad Attitude" takes "the cure" on the beaches of the Hawaii. I know a man in Tucson who worked all his life, spent all of his money recovering from an accident, and then couldn't get welfare money when he needed a few more months of recuperation before returning to work. The lady who turned him down made the mistake of commenting that it was a shame he wasn't a drug addict, because then he would "qualify" for welfare. The man lived on the streets for several months, barely surviving, until he was healthy enough to work, and he has never paid a dime in taxes since then. What is even more atrocious is that a church that he attended occasionally turned down his request for minimal assistance, because their policy was to only help those who qualified for government benefits (in order to help weed out the "bums"). He wasn't "entitled" to the church's help as a Christian, but he would have been, as an agnostic junkie. I met the man in the park, and gave him a place to live for the last month of his recuperation, so he could shit, shower, shave and use it as a base to look for work. In the next two years, the company he went to work for bought around $50,000 worth of computers from me. Before this experience, the man was a "God and Country" type of individual who probably would have turned in anyone he found was "cheating" on their taxes. Now he is perfectly willing to go to jail rather than give the robber barons their booty.