The CHRONICles

I apologize for the severe lack of posts.  Life’s been strange.  I’ve been all over the place, scatterbrained- lost, essentially, but I know I will soon find my way.  It’s been a string of meaningless actions for the past few weeks, and after this weekend, I seek to bring meaning back to my life.  But, in the meantime, I have been reading the writing of a man, a revolutionary, who articulates my soul.  His sentences are concise, but they punch you in the face.  I don’t think I’ve ever read writing so impactful in so few words.  And thus, I give you an essay from sometime in the 1960′s.  I love you, Jerry Rubin.

From his compilation of essays, Do It!, “17. Keep Pot Illegal”

Marijuana makes each person God.

Get high and you want to turn on the world.  It’s never “my dope”- it’s always “our dope.”  Everything for everybody.  The Communist drug.

Pot transforms environments.  All the barriers we build to protect ourselves from each other disappear.

Grass travels around the room like a continually moving kiss.  Smoke grass in the morning.  Stay high all day.

The eight-hour day is the enemy.

When you’re high on pot you enjoy only one thing – the moment.  A minute feels like an hour; an hour can be a minute.  ”Damn it, I missed that appointment.”  All appointments and schedules, times and deadlines disappear.  Man can do what he wants whenever he wants to do it.

Marijuana is the street theater of the mind.

Marijuana is destroying the schools.  Education is conditioning.  Pot deconditions.  School makes us cynics.  Pot makes us dreamers.

Education polarizes our brains into subjects, categories, divisions, concepts.  Pot scrambles up our brains and presents everything as one perfect mess.

We fall off our chairs roaring with laughter when we hear our professors, teachers, experts – the people we’re supposed to learn from – discussing us, our culture, grass.  We feel like those primitive African tribes must have felt when Margaret Mead came popping in with her pencil and paper.

Hearing someone who has not smoked grass talk about it is like hearing a nun talk about sex.

The only expert is the person who does it.

The family that smokes together stays together.

Pot is a magic drug because it can transcend the generation gap.  Everyone should try to turn on his parents.  Marijuana enables the old to become young again; it breaks down defenses parents have about their past.

But it is the rare parent who will even try it.  Parents talk about marijuana the way their parents talked about masturbation.  How many thousands of kids have been sent to mental hospitals by their parents because they smoke pot?  Schools aren’t effective enough as prisons; Once inside a mental hospital there’s no way out.

Professors are afraid to go to parties with students because they may be handed a joint.  And joints are illegal.  If joints are illegal, they might get busted.  If they get busted, they lose their jobs.  The logic of fear.  People who fear have nothing to teach us.

In 1968, marijuana became rampant in the army.  In 1969 low morale, even civil disobedience, became rampant in the army.

Why does grass inspire the Viet Kong and kill the fighting spirit of the Amerikan GI?  Any pot-smoker can understand it; Marijuana is a truth serum.  The Viet Kong are defending their parents, children and homes – their deaths are noble and heroic.  The Amerikans are fighting for nothing you can see, feel, touch or believe in.  Their deaths are futile and wasted.  ”Why die on Hamburger Hill?” asks the pot-smoking Amerikan soldier, as he points his gun at the head of the captain who ordered him to take a hill that only the Viet Kong want.

If the Pentagon tries to stop pot in the army, she’ll end up destroying her army in the process.  But if the army brass leaves grass-smokers alone, army bases will soon be as turned on and uncontrollable as college campuses.

What’s going to happen when all those Amerikan GI’s come home?  ”What do you mean, we’re old enough to fight and die but not old enough to smoke?”

The New Left said: I protest.

The hippies said: I am.

Grass destroyed the left as a minority movement and created in its place a youth culture.

Grass shows us that our lives, not our consciences, are at stake.  As pot-heads we come face-to-face with the real world of cops, jails, courts, trials, undercover narcs, paranoia and the war with our parents.

An entire generation of flower-smokers has been turned into criminals.  There are more than 200,000 people now in jail for dope.  Every pot-head is in jail as long as one is in jail.  The solidarity of saliva.

Grass teaches us disrespect for the law and the courts.  Which do you trust: Richard Milhous Nixon or your own sense organs?

We are what we get high on.

Juice-heads drink alone.  They get drunk and disgusting.  They puke all over themselves.  They pass out.  Alcohol turns off the senses.

Pot-heads smoke together.  We get high and get together.  Into ourselves and into each other.  How can we make a revolution except together?

Make pot legal, and society will fall apart.

Keep it illegal, and soon there will be revolution.

- Jerry Rubin

So let’s raise a fist in the air and spark a doobie with the other.  Power to the pot-heads!

<3! Mother Goose.