Might as well talk about it, now that it’s legal
Last night I did something unusual.
I’ve been very busy the last couple of weeks, but yesterday I managed to wind up all the big deadline-y things. I enjoyed the work, but finishing felt great. The sun was shining, too, after torrential rains earlier in the week and more wetness in the forecast as far as the weatherperson’s eye can see.
Following an afternoon dog walk, I mixed myself a big Bloody Mary, vaped a bowl of Strawberry Cough, and took a long soak in my happily renewed clawfoot tub. Glorious.
Strawberry Cough, for we who are unused to the branded and labeled product, is a strain of marijuana. One of my recent interview subjects turned me on to it. It’s a sativa so mild you scarcely feel it; you merely feel good.
It’s named for its supposed fruity taste and its immediate effect. Truth: the taste is putrid; if strawberries actually tasted like that I wouldn’t eat them. But the “cough” part of the name is accurate. The smoke (or vapor) is sharp and harsh and produces its namesake reaction even in experienced users. Ugh. But it’s so pleasant afterward.
I’ve never been a big pot smoker. I didn’t like the stuff at all when I was a kid (or the empty-headed party people I perceived favored it). But even before legalization, Northwest indoor-grown was a whole different order of experience. Now, being able to buy it by brand and strain, with labels spelling out THC and CBD content is (as they used to say) a head trip.
Before legalization, certainly growers, true aficionados, and medical users were well up on the various strains, their genetics, and their effects. But to everybody else the type of pot was “whatever my friend has.” Or maybe “ditchweed” vs. “kickass.” Now it’s rather like buying wine. “Strawberry overtones,” indeed. Hmph.
Government; The Mother of All Mafias
The last time this subject came up here, several commentators objected — and a part of me understands — that being able to buy a state-licensed and state-taxed product isn’t freedom.
No, it isn’t. What it is is a relief. And for some who’ve lived through the drug war, a miracle.
What we have to understand is that government is nothing more, and nothing less, than a protection racket. As long as government is around, it will either be taxing, licensing, and regulating the things we use (in other words, collecting money). Or it will HURT US for using them. It knows no other method of relating to the world.
Sure, taxes, licenses, and regulations hurt. But not as much as being dragged out of your vehicle or house and being locked up for some arbitrary term.
Better the mob should take its cut and “protect” against its own enforcers.
As long as we’re stuck with the mob, anyway. Getting rid of the mob is another issue.
Liberty or license?
That said, a part of me is very suspicious about the sudden turnabout, not only in government attitudes toward pot, but in the equally quick turnabout in “gender” issues.
I’m glad for both (though I do wish, when it came to gender and sexuality, people would just shut up about it, enjoy their new status, and get on with life). Yet a part of me sees these particular turnarounds as suspiciously decadent.
It’s as if the government knows we’re getting restless and seeks both to hand out favors (beyond the traditional ones of welfare for the masses and graft for the well-connected) and provide us with sensuous diversions to keep our minds off bigger issues.
It’s as if we’re supposed to forget what freedom really means because we’re so absorbed in these particular pleasant personal liberties.
I suspect Rome.
Still, I’ll take it.
Mindset uber alles
No, being able to walk into a state-licensed store and get a recommendation from the enthusiastic young lady who used to be run the Economic Development Commission isn’t freedom. But it’s a big improvement.
Once again I think of those adamant anarchist souls who declare, “I won’t be free until —–” (usually “I won’t be free until no one can tell me what I can do with my own property”).
If that’s your thinking, then I agree. You won’t be free.
And that’s a pity for you.
I know most people here don’t feel that way. The real, personal nature of freedom — freedom as mindset — is an old familiar theme hereabouts. We aren’t raising our fists, shouting demands, and refusing to be free unless we can have 100% unadulterated freedom. Given to us. Or surrendered to us. By somebody else.
But how many of our anarcho-whatever brethren totally miss that freedom begins with mindset and all else follows from there? How many still view freedom as some external condition — which must be all or nothing, undimmed by even a shadow of statism? Or they won’t. Be. Free. Damnit. So. There.
Oh, don’t get me wrong; if I could step through a portal and go live in L. Neil Smith’s North American Confederacy, I would in a heartbeat. I very much think such a thing is worth working and dreaming toward (with or without the dolphins and intelligent ape-citizens).
I’d even fight for such a world, if I knew of any sort of fight that would likely lead there instead of merely ending up with somebody else in charge of a slightly different protection racket.
“I won’t be free until …”
“I won’t be free until …” usually involves being free to do something on our own property that our current neighbors and governments object to. Set up a feed lot. Build a nuke in our garage. Run around naked in the front yard. Grow pot. Burn trash. Whatever. How dare those anti-freedom neighbors stop us!
The reality is that even if someday we each get our own personal asteroid, there are going to be other people in the vicinity who feel (sometimes legitimately) that they need to put limits on our behavior. (“That damned Old Bob. Blew up his own asteroid with that nuke he insisted on tinkering with. Fine for him, but now the trade routes are full of dangerous debris. We need to prevent some future Bob from messing things up for the rest of us.”) Sometimes they’re absolutely right; people have to observe certain courtesies to live in anything resembling society. Other times, they’re complete busybody a**holes.
Either way, people end up forming governments and “protecting” everybody into tyranny — unless we make ourselves and our (physical or intellectual) progeny government-resistant enough to find other ways of interacting with our less-convenient neighbors.
That is a much bigger, harder, though less dramatic fight than any brave April morning fantasies.
Meantime, I’m with the Freedom Feens guys: I’m happy to have both guns and weed. It’s simply the right thing. And I’m appreciating both in proper measure.
Actually, if I had to give up one or the other, “they” could take my Strawberry Cough from my living hands (they have before, after all), but the guns would be hard to pry even from my cold, dead fingers. But for now, here, both are safe from excess “protection.” So pardon me, purists, if you think that’s not a good thing.
I look a freedom as a direction rather than a destination, it’s a moving state of doing more with less interference, of evading the regulator, of getting away with it. I’m a rat in the walls, sometimes heard but rarely seen, and not worth the effort of killing.
I’m too libertarian to give a damn who people sleep with or what gender they think they are, but I think the current trend is going to reverse at some point, in large measure due to the way these folks are behaving. Most people don’t want to think about this stuff and are satisfied as long as they aren’t having their faces rubbed in it. Forcing people to cater gay weddings or having to put up with boys in girls’ locker rooms is rubbing their faces in it. They are making people take sides, and they might not be happy with the side they choose.
Needed that today. Well-stated.
Thanks, Claire. 🙂
Well said, Claire. Two things required for any sort of freedom: Taking charge of the natural authority each person has over their own lives, and accepting responsibility for the consequences – which include the idea that good fences make good neighbors. And the closer people live together, the more critical this becomes.
And then, the desire to be left alone to live in peace has to be coupled with a sincere commitment to leave everyone else to do the same, with self defense as the rational last resort when some just won’t.
We all know that utopia isn’t an option. There will always be some people who want to eat our lunch and ruin our day. Freedom will never appeal to everyone, so I think the best plan is to live as free as we can manage now with a commitment to non-aggression and refusing as much as possible to be sacrificed for what anyone else believes is for the “greater good.” Even libertarian purity.
I thought it was March…
But, yeah. It’s a state of mind. There will always be something standing in the way of some of the things you want to do- even in Libertopia. Reality just works like that.
I’ve been going around with an anonymous commenter on my blog who believes he will never be free until he can “kill them all and let god sort them out“- and he means 7+ billion people. He sees everyone as an aggressor and feels justified in killing everyone. (I’ll post a link to our most recent discussion in a separate comment.)
Here’s the link- A 600 Year-old truth
I think I am not misunderstanding Claire when I say that she is simply saying that freedom first starts in your own mind. If a person would truly wish to be free, they have to free themselves of the notion that they not only are owned by a government which can then enslave them and tell them what to do but they also have no right to demand that the same government give them free stuff simply because they are citizens of the country which the government is supposed to protect.
A government can in no way enslave your mind, they may enslave your person, but it is only when people allow their minds to give up that they have lost. The American Revolution did not start with a gunshot, but with people desiring freedom in their minds. The war was simply the climax of the thoughts of Patriots.
I agree, Claire, and very much respect your insight, as far as this goes:
“The last time this subject came up here, several commentators objected — and a part of me understands — that being able to buy a state-licensed and state-taxed product isn’t freedom.
No, it isn’t…”
But the distinction I make is one that many here might not understand, or agree with. Nevertheless, I contend it is vital.
Being “state-licensed,” controlled, regulated, and rules is not ‘freedom’.
But I contend it’s ultimately not about ‘freedom,’ per se. It is about WHO we SERVE. (And if the Bible doesn’t sit well on this score, or advice from people like Joshua*, or his namesake the Messiah, there are others…)
“It’s about who is to be master, that is all.” (Humpty Dumpty, to Alice, in Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass”.) Yes, he was talking about the meaning of words — “shall not be infringed” comes immediately to mind — but isn’t that ultimately the same thing?
The Founders based the entire Rule of Law which followed the War for Independence on the “self-evident Truths” that involve Rights that come directly from our Creator. If we have the Right to ANY ‘property’ that must, by definition include ourselves, our bodies, and our Right to feed, protect, and provide for them.
Madison correctly said that we must “take alarm” at the very first experiment upon such Rights, rather than waiting for the mafia to be “strengthened by exercise,” as has without question happened in the case of things ‘master’ does not allow his slaves to have, keep, bear, eat, or smoke.
And while I understand the appearance, that the slave master has given the slave a bit of ‘license’ — TODAY — history is every bit as clear that the control has NOT been relinquished, but the precedent WILL be extended!
Yes, the power to tax, not to mention to register and usurp the Right to “buy and sell” such, is the power to destroy.
I know that you have written objectively about the ‘Mark of the Beast’, and those who see the clear path the world is on. I have taught for some time that there’s an obvious issue now evident:
Since there is only ONE specific type of property specifically enumerated in the Constitution or Bill of Rights that “shall not be infringed” — it makes a kind of evil logical sense that if you can require license-permission-‘background check’ to “buy or sell” THAT — then, by extension and precedent — what is there that a slave could POSSIBLY ‘own’ (including their own grope-able, microwave-able bodies) that that Other Master can NOT require his almighty permission in order to “buy or sell”?
SO – while I very much appreciate your perspective, and understand that sense of relief [albeit temporary] – I still have to echo James Madison:
“It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties. . . . The freemen of America did not wait till usurped power had strengthened itself by exercise, and entangled the question in precedents. They saw all the consequences in the principle, and they avoided the consequences by denying the principle. We revere this lesson too much, soon to forget it. . . .”
And then follow it with the responses of both men in Scripture named “Yahushua”:
“As for me and my house, we will serve YHVH.” And “Him ALONE.” Because we can’t serve two masters.
Even if one of ’em is a criminal mafia enterprise who plays god on TV.
Blessings to all!
——————–
* Joshua 24:15 — “Choose this day Whom you will serve…”
@Mark Call — you’re dead on.
Claire, you wrote: “It’s as if the government knows we’re getting restless and seeks both to hand out favors (beyond the traditional ones of welfare for the masses and graft for the well-connected) and provide us with sensuous diversions to keep our minds off bigger issues.”
This is the reason the govt funds the building of colossal sports arenas and stadiums and taxes the people for them… they are a distraction, a diversion to keep the people’s minds off greater issues.
……….
Why do people so freely accept the taking of their freedoms?
Our educational system began changing course over a century ago with the intent of dumbing down the populace to make them more tractable–oxen to power the machine–and that is one of the primary forces operating still to give the govt ever more power. Where freedom begins in one’s mind, we will never pass it from generation to generation as long as we allow the govt indoctrination centers to mold the minds of our children. We talk about having freedom and not accepting welfare, but public education is designed as a welfare system for parents, freeing their time from the responsibilities of child-rearing rather than sending them EBT cards. And the fact is, you will have to pay for the education system even if you accept your personal responsibility and raise your own children to be freedom loving citizens.
It’s hard to accept Joshua 24:15 and turn your children over to the govt for indoctrination.
Well Claire here we are, Again, raising Cain and disrupting the “don’t rock the boat folks” otherwise known as “State-ists/liberals. Good job! Having to have a licenses, permit, compliance anything isn’t and probably shouldn’t be considered freedom or a sense of liberty, but it is at the very least a some what step in the right direction. Personally I don’t smoke pot any more but I don’t care if others do. The good Lord made that plant and it grows on just about every continent on this planet, as a native species. In Colorado pot was “Decriminalized” for adults, but you still have to go to a licensed store,….just like a liquor store, to get some. As for as freedom goes it is more of a state of mind (now more than ever) just like living in Hardyville. The little village I live in isn’t called Hardyville except by me,…cause that’s what I choose. I don’t care what the rest of the world thinks of me, or my ways. I choose to be free therefore I am! Viva La Vita! Live Life!
@Kent McManigal I followed your link and read the entire thread. While it seems like an oxymoron for a libertarian to contact the authorities, I would be concerned about your blog being labeled by the type of person who gravitates to it and this “Anonymous” there is definitely bad news. You know that all political or freedom oriented sites are monitored by the authorities, I assume?
I have a friend who has supported himself modestly with basement production for several decades, and in occasionally helping him with his gardening I have come to appreciate these plants. Fascinating things, and pretty, to my eye.
Any case, as far as my friend can see, all the current loosening of our chains has effected is a vast increase in demand, while the new regulatory structure seems to be supporting price levels or more likely, forcing noticeable price-rises. For some time now he’s been urging me to find a space and get started.
Back in the first place my interest was pretty much just in learning something new, especially across a range of activity where people were living their lives without asking permission. So I’ve been curious to discover the outlook of the new participants in the game, both the shopkeepers and their customers.
When at a dispensary (as they’ve been designated) I will suggest that “this is not what freedom looks like,” or I will try to make some sarcastic comment or other about living “in the land of the free.” But it’s not clear to me that people in the shops even recognize that phrase “land of the free.”
As a potential customer I am treated politely, but behind the counter all they’re really interested in is collecting the required customer info and packaging their product in the strictly specified containers. And I would characterize other customers as largely indifferent to my words. “What are you talking about–this is great man!”
Given the small slice of this subculture which I’ve seen it’s hard for me to say wherefrom has come the impetus for these present changes.
“Given the small slice of this subculture which I’ve seen it’s hard for me to say wherefrom has come the impetus for these present changes.”
I’ve wondered about that myself. I suspect TPTB have helped defeat their own cause by over-enthusiasm for the War on Drugs. Too many people have been affected–families, friends, neighbors–by SWAT teams, killing of pets, imprisonment, etc. from the local level on up to the feds, and the general attitude of “The State vs The People” http://www.amazon.com/State-vs-People-American-Police/dp/096423047X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1457210561&sr=8-1&keywords=The+State+vs+The+People has soured the populace against the drug war. AND, our illustrious “representatives” are hearing and feeling that backlash.
@JackO- If the “authorities” are monitoring my blog, they already know about him and have also seen me (and others) refute (or, so I believe…) his arguments. I won’t contact them. There is no situation so bad it can’t be made orders of magnitude worse by inviting a cop to join in.
It’s as if we’re supposed to forget what freedom really means because we’re so absorbed in these particular pleasant personal liberties.
Precisely. “Freedom” is one of those words which has been systematically stripped of all meaning.* We happily refer to the US as the “land of the free” and honor our military for “defending our freedom” by fighting endless, unwinnable wars in worthless hellholes halfway across the globe. Every politician pandering for votes sings paens to freedom (while doing everything he can to reduce it once he gains office). But “freedom” doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it means freedom from something. And fundamentally, that “something” is government. “Freedom” means freedom from government; nothing less. But no one thinks of that, because we are so busy enjoying the few areas of our lives which remain unregulated (or at least minimally regulated). We frogs have been well and truly boiled, and we still don’t realize it. Because we have been conditioned to accept a content-free concept of “freedom”.
* Just like the word “federal”. We habitually refer to ours as a “federal government” when in reality it is a national government in all but name. The entire concept of “federalism” has been subverted, without anyone seeming to notice.
“I suspect Rome.”
Funny you should combine this line of thought and Strawberry Cough in the same post. SC will always be Michael Cain’s Strain to me…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dgbyrD1Yw8
The government in some areas allowing some people to use a controlled substance in tightly controlled quantities and circumstances with proper permits, permissions and identification is hard to picture as freedom. It is kind of like saying I am free because I can buy all the govt regulated,taxed, licensed and controlled booze I want. Just have to be over 21, not driving, not possess the wrong amount or cross the wrong boundary, not in public view etc. Free.
But maybe it is best to take a long view, after all it took Ho Chi Minh over 40 years to achieve freedom for the Vietnamese people.