This One's for the "Bag of Dicks"

So, it turns out that the Uncle's friend is a felon, thus making his gun problems a little stickier. Uncle says he feels "like a bag of dicks for bringing all this up, though I did so based how it was presented to me. I wasted everyone's time." Uncle, I understand your embarrassment, but really, you have no reason to be. It got me thinking of how, a couple of years ago, one of my upper middle class acquaintances asked me if I could recommend a good rehab program because people in my family have had "drug problems."* Without even thinking, I just blurted out, "People like us don't go to rehab, we go to jail. I have no idea what good rehab programs are, because that's not an option for us." I know how much you conservatives love to believe that all a person has to do is work really hard and keep his nose clean and he can rise up from abject poverty and become president, but it's late, we're all tired, let's just admit that some of us, no matter how hard we try, seem to have the deck stacked against us. And, true, sometimes we do some of that stacking ourselves. But people fuck up. They fuck up all the time. And you guys, good god, it's like you go crazy at 15 and don't rejoin the land of the sane until you're in your early to mid twenties. It's not the faultless who need our help and protection. Those above blame almost always emerge from shit unscathed. It's those of us who royally fucked up at 18 or who spent their thirties in the bottle or who sold their brother out to keep from going to jail or whatever, it's those of us who have something that can be used against us who need to be protected from the government most of all,precisely because it seems like we deserve it less. It's like Blake says, this is how it works--"they will more than likely try to pin something...anything...on him. When a government's wheels are set into motion, there's no stopping it." The only mistake you made was not realizing that, in this case, the government's wheels were set in motion against this guy a long, long time ago. *Remind me some day to tell you about my grandma's funeral. The most alarming part was when my cousin's drug dealer showed up to collect some unpaid debts and my cousin talked all my younger cousins into letting him have the spare change out of their cars. I think the only thing worse than not paying the man who supplies you with coke is trying to pay him in change you've conned your little cousins out of. Though it's pretty damn funny.