Something unusual has happened at the Lewiston Sun Journal. A paper with a heavy left-wing slant has finally told the truth about the number one problem in Maine.
The story reports on an alcoholic who confronted her problem only after being threatened with death at the hands of an attacker. Thinking she was going to die, she prayed to God, asking His forgiveness for a misspent life. The story says she then turned over a new leaf, and is now getting off drugs and alcohol.
The story looks as if it would be more at home in the journal of The Women's Christian Temperance Union, than the liberal Sun Journal. The mainstream media is notorious for glamorizing drugs and alcohol, but there is a clear trend in some news outlets towards what early generations called a temperance movement. The vanguard in the fight against booze has moved from Evangelical churches - who are now largely apathetic about the issue -- to the Left and its allies. The reason why the mainstream media is flirting with the temperance movement is that alcohol and drug abuse has risen to truly alarming levels. No one living in America today can overlook the ever-present evidence that alcohol destroys lives. The woman featured in the Lewiston Sun Journal story, for example, was jailed fourteen times on drug charges. Reading between the lines, it is clear that alcohol was her biggest problem.
The opening shot in Maine's renewed crusade against booze was fired by the Portland Press Herald in an October 1997 article entitled "A Lethal Hold on Maine." The imagery used in the article is straight out of the Temperance Movement. The piece begins "Alcohol ravages our state like an insidious and relentless virus." The toll exacted by alcohol in Maine does indeed stagger the imagination. There were 188 traffic deaths related to drunk driving for the most recent year statistics were available. Over 41,000 died nationwide as a result of drunk driving in 2007. Although Maine no longer keeps statistics on alcohol-related crimes, alcohol has figured in many recent high-profile cases, including an ongoing trial in Bangor in which a drunk driver rolled over his pickup, paralyzing his nineteen year-old pregnant girlfriend.
In another recent case, a drunk driver from Wells was sentenced to eight years in prison for killing two motorists while driving the wrong way on the Maine Turnpike.
One topic that is going to remain out of bounds for the mainstream media, for obvious reasons, is the close historical co-operation between the liquor trade and organized crime, a theme which was emphasized by temperance organizations in the twenties and thirties, but has all but been forgotten today. In many cases, the same organized crime figures who peddled booze in the Prohibition years, sold cocaine and heroin on the side. The current practice of the Maine Office of Substance Abuse is to classify alcohol as just another drug. If alcohol is a drug, an enlightened society will eventually catch on, and ban it. At least on the issue of alcohol, the liberals and the government have caught up with and overtaken the Christians.
The statue shown above is Frances Elizabeth Willard, who was for many years the only woman to stand in Statuary Hall in the Capitol Rotunda in Washington, D.C. Willard, who was President of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, was instrumental in securing the passage of both the 18th Amendment (Prohibition) and the 19th Amendment (the right of women to vote.) Her statue was donated to the American people by her grateful home state of Illinois.
