By DAN VALENTI

PLANET VALENTI News and Commentary

(FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE, MONDAY, MAY 4, 2015) — The heroin epidemic ravaging the country, state, county, city, neighborhoods, and homes has produced a devastating, incalculable toll on individuals, families, and communities. As you drive Pittsfield’s neighborhoods, streets seem to contain a bit more trash. Houses appear more unkempt than before. In the downtown, one finds daily evidence of The Walking Dead.

It’s no mystery that the cultural toehold for a generation of young people is the pitiful visage of that fictional archetype, the zombie. Unfortunately, its real-life counterpart is not the product of an artist’s imagination. We see them every day. The hollow eyes of an addict contain the deep wells of hopelessness whose vastness swallow independence, self-respect, and productivity.

Where Does Responsibility Lie?

Who is responsible for this life each of has been called upon to live by virtue of having been born? Who bears the cost of a cascade of bad decisions going back two-score years? On a personal level, each of us has responsibility for our lives, of course, because we own ourselves. While giving us the freedom to make our own choices, self-ownership also requires owning up to the consequences of our choices, good or bad.

Or so it once was.

What has happened to this paradigm? When did we stop believing that each of us is responsible for cleaning up the messes we make? Did it begin in the crib and the sandbox, when a generation of parents allowed pampered kids to litter the inside and out with more toys than they could ever want? Did it start in school, when kids were allowed to dress like gangstas and hookahs, swearing at any teacher who tried to instill classroom discipline? Did the seed get planted in a D.A.R.E. class, that expensive, ineffective commercial for the pleasures of drugs? Was it the “refrigerator moms” of the Baby Boomer generation, who chose self-indulgence and careers over emotional bonding with their children? THE PLANET can’t say, and we leave the matter for another day.

Another way of getting at this topic to ask: What are the cumulative cultural costs of having become A Society of Victims? Forget LJB’s Great Society. This “society” was anything but great, and it took bloom in the 1980s and 90s.  Its major premise is that everyone is a victim, and as a victim, “It’s never your fault.” If you’re overweight, it’s not that you don’t exercise and eat tons of fatty food. You have a “genetic disposition for corpulence.” For almost any self-caused problem in The Society of Victims, you’re off the hook. Go into “recovery memory therapy” and “remember” bad things done to you as a child — even those the memories were false.

A Society of Victims

In A Society of Victims, no one is responsible for their lives or what happens to them as a result of the choices they make. Here’s a specific example that has to do with one of the many profoundly damaging aspects of the nation’s current heroin epidemic — the cost of treating drug-exposed babies born to addicted moms, the bulk of which must be borne by taxpayers.

Two studies show the shocking cultural and social deterioration. Between 2000 and 2009, treatment of babies with “neonatal abstinence syndrome” amounted to $732 million a year. Three-quarters, 75%, of the costs were picked up by Medicaid — that is, the taxpayers (Boston Herald, “Treating drug-exposed babies costly: Taxpayers covering 80 percent of $1.5B bill each year,” May 1, 2015).

That’s bad enough, but what has happened in the intervening years? A new joint study by the National Institute of Health and the National Institute on Drug Abuse conducted by Vanderbuilt University shows that between 2009 and 2012, the costs have doubled to $1.5 billion. Meanwhile, under Obamacare, taxpayers now pick up 80 percent of the bill. When contacted by The Herald, the state Health and Human Services Department spokesperson said “in-state Medicaid costs for drug-exposed newborns was not immediately available.”

Why should they be? Why should the state bother to monitor these costs? The state is run by tax-happy Democrats, who know they have a handy mark to pick up the rising costs heaped on us by a horde of irresponsible “victims.” That mark goes by the name of Mary Jane and Joe Kapanski, The Little Guy, the average taxpayer who is starting to look up at the distant middle class.

Hospitals across the country have seen a deluge of heroin cases. Many of them involve pregnant women who give birth to drug-addled babies. According to the HIH/NIDA study, the frequency of drug-addicted newborns jumped from one birth per hour to one birth every 25 minutes. Probably close to everyone of those preggers attended D.A.R.E. classes as youngsters. How’d that work out them? For society?

The Solution? Give the Taxpayers a Break — Eat the Babies

The Herald quotes Massachusetts congresswoman Katherine Clark calling for a “cost-effective, common-sense solution” to help out individual states being pulled down by a generation of “victims.” In true political fashion, however, Clark doesn’t specify what that “solution” might be or look like. THE PLANET issues a warning: Hold on to your wallets, ladies and gents.

THE PLANET offers this “Modest Proposal” as a solution: Any baby born of parents who can’t pay for the costs of treating their drug-addled offspring will be sterilized, to prevent further spawning. The babies, meanwhile, will be used as food for the upper 1%. Babies, well done, taste better than veal, we are told.

“A young healthy child … is, at a year old, a delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.”

We would call this plan, A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People From Being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick, except Jonathan Swift beat us to it.

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“There’s never been a better time to start in life. It ain’t too early and it ain’t too late!” — Rogers and Hammerstein, “Oklahoma,” (1943).

“OPEN THE WINDOW, AUNT MILLIE.”

LOVE TO ALL.