Burning Weed

Today at breakfast I picked up a copy of the Little Nickel Classifieds, usually a good place to find jobs, cheap trucks, or adoption-for-hire schemes.

The first ad on the front page was for a tip-line that pays up to $5000 for turning in pot farmers.

Right next to it were a solid dozen ads for "Medical Marijuana" ranging from home-delivery to dubious "Doctors" prepared to write you out a script for $100 bucks a pop.

One of the biggest reasons there is next to no meaningful Left (the Liberal class, the Dems, most of the Progressives, and Greens in the US are "Leftist" in more or less the same way that McDonald's is "food") in the US is pot.

More specifically, the fetishization of pot by a large number of left-leaning people, the continued criminalization of pot by the establishment right, and the division within the would-be Left over pot.

So many of those who hold socialist, anarchist, co-operative, and communalist views are more interested in getting high, and the legalization of their drug of choice then they are in social justice, universal health care, ending poverty (more on that tomorrow), ecological justice, or the end to America's permanent wars on various common nouns.

Except of course the "War on Drugs".

That one they'll fight.

For the record, I support the legalization of pot, not because I smoke it, not because I entertain some rainbow-colored unicorn shit idea that "The world would be better if everyone smoked weed", but because making pot criminal fuels the prison-industrial complex, is used as an excuse for ever-increasing intrusive police state measures, and serves to prevent the adoption of wide-spread agricultural/industrial use of renewable hemp (which the "legalize it" crowd often tries to trot out as the "real" reason for their quest, which would seem a lot more reasonable if they weren't red-eyed and scarfing down White Castle).

But the sheer amount of time, energy, and focus that goes into this one issue is completely out of whack. The US is currently fighting two seemingly endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention "police actions" and such in Columbia, Guiana, Belize, most of the 'Stans, Yemen, and the Horn of Africa, to name just a few. The last three years have seen the single greatest movement of wealth from the poor to the rich in the history of, well, history. The rich/poor gap has ballooned, the planet is as sick as a chemo-patient, a cabal of trans-national corporations are constantly tightening their grip on the very essentials and building blocks of life (water, food, DNA) and the one thing that gets the vote out, the one thing that stirs the soma-vacationing Left outa it's off-grid cabins is the call to legalize pot?

Which of course hands the Corporatist Right and their butt-kissing Moralist minions enough ammo to blow gaping holes in the credibility of anyone in anyway connected to the legalize-it-left, while those "leftists" who reject pot (and booze, and tobacco, and meat, and sex, and well, most things that make life fun) and tattoo X's into their fists turn on the very people who they claim to share ideals of ecological and social justice with, because unlike the Moralist crowd, the left likes to smoke, drink, and fuck.

Ok, fine, the Moralists like to smoke drink and fuck too, they just won't admit it.

How about we focus on the pressing issues; human rights, social justice, economic equality, the abolition of wealth (more on that tomorrow too), and ecological justice, and leave the legalization of pot (or the criminalization of animal products, stupid vegans) until the current tide of reactionary economic fascism has been beaten back into Mordor and the gates slammed shut?

Easter Blog.

Easter Sunday, 2010.

Tonight I was made to feel very, very small.

I stumbled out of Embla's family summer house, too full of whiskey, barely recovered from my traditional Easter Vacation Flu, to smoke an obscenely uncalled for pipe, when I looked up.

Northern Lights.

Not the brightest or most colorful I've ever seen, not by a long shot. Dull enough that the jaded elders at the gathering poo-pooed them and went back inside to argue about what DVD to watch.

Me, I stood there staring. I've seen them before of course, but never so much at once. The whole sky, from horizon to horizon was a subtle, shifting, melding green water-color wash, spiraling above this lonely farmstead in walls a photon wide and a hundred miles tall before racing off at the speed-off-light-deciding-to-notice-magnetism across the sky, careening into itself, rebounding, rolling, waves on a sea that we've forgotten we can sail.

I sat there thinking that there may well come a day when we can all agree what the Northern Lights are, but I hope we never agree what they mean.

Tonight, to me, they meant this.

I'm a tiny little organism, crawling through my whiskey-soaked, tobacco-stained existence. I'm never going to see the Earth from orbit, my feet will never tread lunar soil. With a lifetime to spend and a fortune to propel me I would never glimpse but a fraction of the wonders of this planet, let alone worlds untraveled and unnamed.

But I wish to whatever power you believe in that we'd get off our collective asses and start!

We're better than this people. We are more than our economics and our petty nation-states, our dogmas and our superstitions, our fetishes and idols. Or at least we should be. We, the collective meaningful we, should be out there staring into the furnace of creation, planting fields in alien soil and singing in atmosphere so foreign that our melodies are remade into gravity's songs.

We need something truly heroic in our lives, in the bigger-than-all-of-us-because-it-is-all-of-us sense.

When my parents were children my grandparents generation sent men to the moon.

And then they stopped.

That was the one of the most underrated tragedies of the 20^th century. Yes, there was genocide and ecocide and war and pestilence and famine, but frankly that shit had all been done before and has been done since. Lamentable yes, heartrending yes, never fucking again yes, but not specific to the 20th. After finally witnessing its own utter cosmic insignificance, humankind decided to just give up and stay home.

Which brings me around, as it usually does, to me.

Who's going home.

Icelandic has these two words that form a brilliant symmetry; útþrá and heimþrá. Þrá means essentially “desire” or “longing” so heimþrá is the longing to go home, and with that, the love of home, and útþrá is its complementary opposite, the longing to discover, the love and desire for that which is outside of your experience. I'm currently feeling these same things in equal proportion.

And so should we all.

The love of one's home and the desire to explore are not contradictory, they are complimentary.

But people, especially lefty intellectual types and their complementary opposites on the right have long argued that space exploration is a waste of time and money, that we “have problems here on Earth to solve first”.

And they're right. To a point. We do have problems that need solving.

So let's fucking solve them already.

We have the necessary wisdom, knowledge, and will to feed, shelter, clothe, educate, care for, and encourage every single person on this planet. Don't even try to argue with me. We could do it if we wanted to.

We could make our home not a Utopian (nasty things Utopias, always with the fascist nastiness just under the surface) but so much better than it is now that our children's children would hardly believe it. It wouldn't be that hard. We have the technology, we have the systems, we have the theories of ethics, of politics, of economics, etc.

Which leaves me wondering, chicken or egg? Is the fact that we went to the fucking moon with far less computational power than the average IPhone going to wake people up to the fact that solving our earthly woes isn't about finding some new miraculous technology, or is finally getting off our asses and out into the cosmos finally going to convince people that we're all in this together so we might as well fix shit when its broken?

I honestly don't know. I can't tell you.

Because tonight I feel very, very small in the face of existence, and its glorious.