The Wounded Animal, Crawling Forward

The title of this post refers to a metaphor I have used with regard to the state of things in the USA.  While there are systemic problems (the wounds) in the USA (the animal) the beast is still moving forward.  People tend to focus on the wounds and forget that the animal is still moving.  There is outcry that the animal isn't "over there" but forget that it is moving at all.

It is important that people concentrate on the wounds so that they can be healed and the animal can move forward further and faster knowing that the animal is moving brings the increased happiness that optimism brings, and also the encouragement that wounds CAN be healed.

In that light I bring to your attention a momentous movement barely noticed in the media, the highest prosecutor in the land essentially saying the War on Drugs is at least somewhat of a failure and that there is a serious problem with how much we put people in jail.  This might actually make a difference because this is perhaps the only area in Congress where the right and left edges of US politics agree.

From the article - "The war on drugs is now 30, 40 years old," Holder said. "There have been a lot of unintended consequences. There's been a decimation of certain communities, in particular communities of color."
 Some of the items are changes Holder can make on his own, such as directing U.S. attorneys not to prosecute certain kinds of low-level drug crimes, or spending money to send more defendants into treatment instead of prison. Almost half of the 219,000 people currently in federal prison are serving time on drug charges.
.. the Justice Department explicitly pointed to state reform efforts in a letter to the U.S. Sentencing Commission in July. The old system, wrote official Jonathan Wroblewski, is being replaced with the idea that budgets are "finite," prison is a power that should be "exercised sparingly and only as necessary," and that "reducing reoffending and promoting effective reentry are core goals."

Such changes would be positively transformative in the  lives of tens of thousands of people a year.  It is also something that many would have considered politically inconceivable a decade ago.