That Old Time Education

I went drifting
through the capitals of tin
where men can't walk or freely talk
and sons turn their fathers in

An elderly woman reflects on her experiences as a young girl under prohibition. One of her teachers was an enthusiastic teetotaler, who "would discourse on the evils of liquor and the lawbreakers who made it and consumed it."

This being the Prohibition Era, most everyone had a still of their own, including this woman's father. So as a girl this woman seriously debated whether or not to turn her father in to the police.

She writes "After her diatribes, I began to feel that every horrible thing that had ever happened, from slavery to war, was caused by alcohol's evil influence." I think this was something like the intended effect of the environmentalist events in my elementary school which I recently wrote about. Nothing new under the sun.