Different Slants

2004080413, originally uploaded by richard_munden.

Amsterdam. The Red Light District. Prostitutes, Porn shows. Marijuana Museum. Legalized drugs. A world renown den of inequity. How does a culture that permits such abominations survive?

Quite well actually.

Holland has always been one of the world’s most permissive societies. During Europe’s religious wars, Holland, a Protestant country, required Catholic churches to take down there signs and “not make too much noise” while elsewhere in Europe, practicing the out-of-favor religion was punishable by death.

In Amsterdam you can walk into a “Coffee Shop” (if you are over 21) and order a coffee. Everyone will look at you funny. If hard pressed, they will find a cup of coffee for you. Then they will offer a menu with a dazzling array of types of marijuana and hashish. Rolling papers are free. Other shops offer organically grown psychedelic mushrooms.

Or you can walk down the streets of the Red Light District and see scantily clad women sitting in shop windows selling their bodies (OK, renting) in broad daylight. Come back at night you will find many more.

Where does all this permissiveness get a country? Well, to start with, they have less the one seventh the incarceration rate of the US. Does that mean they just let criminals run free? No, it means they have a lower crime rate. The murder rate in the US is 2.5 times that in the Netherlands.

Maybe they keep the crime rate down by not making things that don’t hurt other people illegal. Could the US do that?  No, it is too intuitive. Besides, law enforcement and corrections our two of our biggest growth industries.

I only spent a short time in Amsterdam but, it seemed like the greatest danger was of being run down by a women riding a bicycle while talking on her cell phone.  In inhabitants appeared to be perfectly comfortable walking around the not too well lighted streets late at night.  But then, most European countries a safer than the US.

Travel. It gives you a lot to think about.