my ex is currently on dui #4. supposedly illinois has some of the toughest dui laws but those laws mean very little when you have the good ole boy club. in my ex's cases, he knew a guy who contributed alot of money to the state's atty's campaign so dui #1 was dismissed.

dui #1 - he nearly killed himself in an accident, had his blood drawn, was flown to a trauma center & yet it was STILL dismissed. yeah makes sense.

dui #2 - he blew a .17 on this one, got license revoked 3 months & got it back. no biggie.

dui #3 - he was found unresponsive in his truck in the middle of a highway. they drew his blood at the hospital & he was .16. by now he had a CDL license so in illinois you only have to be .04 to be considered dui.

and finally 4 short months later came...
dui #4 - he refused to blow. license revoked, spent a few days in jail, paid $2500 in fines, & is never supposed to be able to obtain a CDL again.
i have no idea how long his license will be revoked this time. the research i've done says anywhere from 3-10 years.

he's an alcoholic. was sober for 12 years & made the decision 3 years ago that he'd just go ahead & drink again. you can't stop them. no laws will stop them. they don't care. he risked his career to drink & drive - a career he supposedly loved. he risked everything by drinking again & lost everything. he still doesn't care. he's lied to everyone he knows including his 7 year old twin boys. he doesn't care. he will do anything he can to get alcohol. he doesn't drive now but has hooked up with some 20 year old kid who drives him to the bars & parties with him. my ex is almost 44 years old. he lives with his parents who keep bailing him out of everything. he's always been the 'golden' child even though his sister is an amazingly wonderful person who has never caused them a moments worry. it's beyond sad - it's sickening. i will forever have guilt that he's the man i chose to father my children. he was sober for 7 years before we had the boys but i will always carry that guilt.

"4PackGirl" wrote:

Sigh.

What if we just recognized life is inevitably going to have some fuckheads in it? And sometimes fuckheads are going to get away with, well, murder.

There are 300+ million people in this country. Most of them on the highway every day.

Take that "2 747-loads/week" stat. Okay, that's 700 people a week. Say they are distributed relatively evenly across the country. There are about 3 million out of those 300 million living in Iowa. If the 700 people a week number were correct that would mean 7/week are killed in Iowa.

It actually isn't that high...it's probably 1/3 of that or less. Actually, I'm betting there's less than 2/week killed in Iowa. That's 100/year.

Let's say your "castrate 'em and make 'em have an interlock device" strategies work beyond your wildest dreams. You cut drunk driving fatalities by half. You save 50 lives. Hooray for you.

At what cost? What does it cost to castrate a few hundred people? (Forget about the civil liberties. They're scum after all. They should be happy we don't send them to Gitmo. I'm just talking about the cost of the surgical procedure and the clean up/disposal crew.) What does it cost to buy several thousand interlock devices and a few hundred extra cops and enforcement officers and assistant DAs and social workers and goddamn lawyers to deal with all that.

Yeah, life sucks sometime. I've lost people I know and value to drunk drivers. Life is a shit sandwich that gets fed to good people when the bastards eat Chateaubriand.

But I don't care if you buy Kohler's top of the line toilet. You're not going to eliminate the shit of the world.

You're just going to have a bigger bill for your toilet.

"Wade" wrote: