DEEP GREEN PERSPECTIVE

A recent Nashville newspaper featured a story about a young teenager who went to a party where she was offered marijuana, which she tried. She decided she didn’t like it, and when she went home she told her ma about it—ma rewarded her honesty by grounding her and taking away her cell phone. Thanks, ma!

Should be end of story, right? Wrong. Girl is waiting for schoolbus Monday morning, reaches into backpack for lip gloss, and pulls out—a baggie of weed! Surprise! Must have been a surprise—no kid in his or her right mind who was intentionally bringing a baggie to school would pull it out and wave it around at the bus stop, for cryin’ out loud!

So, some of the kids waiting with her saw it and reported her to the principal, who showed up at the girl’s first period class with two police officers, took her out of class, and, in accordance with the school’s “zero tolerance” policy, suspended her from school for a year. Since there was no dispute about the fact that she had a baggie of marijuana in her possession, her mother’s appeals on behalf of this honor roll student were denied. This has also led to her losing her driver’s license, so she’s mostly sitting at home reading books and thinking things over. She certainly has a lot to reflect on. She’s really been taught to respect authority, hasn’t she? Authority sure respected her, by golly, didn’t it? Welcome to the machine, kid!

This story does a lot to demonstrate how the “war on drugs” has turned America into a police state. Just for openers, she was snitched off by the other kids at the bus stop. Then, instead of calling her quietly to the office and asking for an explanation, the assistant principal showed up with two uniformed police officers, took her out of class, and cut her no slack for the accidental appearance of a baggie in her backpack. I’m inclined to believe her. I mean, why would she tell her ma she didn’t like it and then bring a bag to school? Unless mom and daughter are presumed to both be lying, it doesn’t make sense!

So, now she has a one-year suspension for “drug possession” in her permanent record, which will make leading a normal life difficult for her in many ways. Hopefully, she will respond to this monstrous injustice not by buckling under, but by devoting her life to changing the inhumane system that has branded her with a scarlet “M” for something she didn’t even intend to do.

So this starts as a story about America’s descent into being a drug-induced police state, but at a deeper level, it illustrates our country’s incredible schizophrenia about illegal drugs. It’s been said that marijuana is a drug that causes panic attacks and irrational behavior in people who hear about other people using it, and that’s certainly what we’re seeing here, and in many other cases where “zero tolerance” has wrecked teenagers’ lives for utterly trivial reasons.

Because–meanwhile, millions of completely functional Americans use marijuana regularly, all the while going to school, working, and raising families—just as millions of people all over the world have used marijuana for thousands of years. What is it about “getting high” that the current world order is so afraid of? Why are marijuana users (not to mention mushroom eaters, etc.) demonized?

Let’s just leave that question sitting there and go to what might at first seem like an unrelated issue—abortion rights. Immediately, though, we see parallels. Some people who would not have an abortion themselves firmly believe that it is wrong for anyone to have an abortion, and want the law to reflect their religious belief. Forget secular government! My religion is the only true one! In fact, some are so deeply committed to what they call “respect for life” that they will murder people who perform abortions. (Does not compute? Try harder!)

Another parallel is that, ultimately, the anti-abortion movement is an anti-pleasure movement—based in the concept that if a woman is going to have sex, she should be prepared to have a baby as a result. That’s the real reason the “abstinence only” and “anti-abortion” messages often go hand in hand—with “just say no” as the third major right-wing control message (and in many ways, their most successful)—because, as everybody admits, getting high and getting laid both feel good—the argument is over whether it’s OK to feel good thataway or not.

The issue of control is where the drug and abortion pieces lock in to the Iraq piece of the puzzle. When Bush crowned himself as “Il Duce,” excuse me, I mean “The Decider,” he wasn’t just talking about Iraq. He was talking about drugs and abortion and education and welfare and social security and the environment and every other issue where his rule has meant windfall profits for the wealthy. And this is where we see the grand scheme of things. If the powers that be can convince enough people that marijuana is a terrible scourge even though it patently isn’t, if enough people will believe that abortion and loose sexuality are terrible scourges even though they aren’t, then it’s that much easier to sell war in the Middle East when it’s really as justified as the Nazi invasion of Poland. If they can get you to buy one lie, it’s that much easier to sell you another, and another, and another….

Green Party politics—what does any of this have to do with Green Party politics? It has to do with the need to change the discourse in this country, to change the view, to change the—dare I say it?–paradigm. Is that word too “New-Agey” for you? Tough beans! The old paradigm is running the planet over a precipice and we gotta do something radical to deal with it really soon—prevention is no longer an option. We’re going to have to settle for damage control.

“Ecological wisdom” and “Future focus” are the two key values of the Green Party that come to mind. “Ecological wisdom” in this case, means getting our priorities straight and refocusing our cultural attention from peoples’ private lives to the overall health of the Earth. Future focus, in the case of the young Nashville schoolgirl, means that we do not make what should have been a minor faux-pas into an incident that’s likely to skew the rest of a kid’s life. You should have to be smarter than that to run a school system.

music: Joan Baez, “The Story of Isaac“

Comments

While reading thru your posts I noticed that there weren’t alot of comments, and I began to wonder why not? After long consideration I have concluded that the reason must be that your logic is so thoroughly sound that nothing more can be added. Have an iced ay!
Posted by revelation on 02/12/2007 03:16:34 PM

geez…i hope i’m not the smartest guy in the room! thanks…
Posted by brothermartin on 02/14/2007 05:35:27 AM

My wife and I like to go out dancing a couple of times a month, and for the last three years one of our favorite dance parties has been centered around an African drumming group led by a friend and neighbor of ours. The gathering rapidly became too big to meet in anyone’s home, so for a while we met in the sanctuary of a local “New-Age” church, where the altar bore the somewhat ironic (for us) inscription, “be still and know that I am God.” We describe ourselves as a “rhythm church,” and for us it’s more like, “shake your booty and know that you are God/dess.” Well, somebody in the congregation thought they saw someone smoking a joint in the parking lot, and complained to the minister, and we were outta there. Zero tolerance. It was wonderful to see how the standards of proof were applied, if you know what I mean…..

The next venue that we settled into was a “coffee house” in an urban neighborhood. They had great food, served good beer for those who were into it, didn’t allow smoking indoors, and had just enough room for a dance floor when we pushed the tables back. Recently, however, we have run afoul of unintended consequences. The coffeehouse applied for a wine license—and, according to Tennessee law, an establishment with a wine license must maintain forty usable chairs at tables, at all times, whether the customers want ‘em or not. They can’t be pushed back into a pile, or the ever-vigilant inspectors from the Alcoholic Beverage Commission will levy a fine.

Could we declare ourselves “a private party” and keep meeting at the coffeehouse? Well, the liquor law says that all “private parties” in public establishments must be reported, and, according to the coffeehouse/wine bar’s manager, too many private parties in a row “raises red flags.”

I started making phone calls and going on the web to confirm what I was hearing. An employee of the ABC told me that she didn’t know anything about the history of or rationale for the law, it was simply her business to enforce it. Along the way, I found out that a “dance license” is also required for places that intend to feature dancing as part of their activities. And what happens if people just get up and start to dance? Is it illegal to dance, for cryin’ out loud? Apparently, it is. The laws of Metropolitan Davidson County state:

“It is unlawful to hold or conduct any public dance or to operate any public dancehall within the metropolitan government area until such dancehall or other place in which such public dance may be held shall first have been duly registered as a public dancehall with the chief of police and a permit shall have been issued by the beer permit board for the operation of such dancehall or the holding of such dance, an application fee of one hundred dollars plus a one hundred dollar annual fee for the permit.” 6.12.020 Registration, permit and fees required.

Wow, we’d been breaking the law all along. Apparently, if you have a reasonable expectation that people are going to get up and dance at your public function, you gotta pony up two hundred bucks, even if it’s a free, one-time event. That’s a party pooper, eh?

Of course, the logical reason for all this is wanting to avoid the tragedy that could occur if a large number of people were in a room with poor exits and the place caught fire, or the floor collapsed, and it’s true that such tragedies have occurred. But they occurred in a different context than our community of drummers and dancers.

This statute presumes that there is some separation between the promoter and the public, that the promoter will, if possible, exploit the public and even expose people to danger in order to make a little more money, and that the state must therefore act to protect the public from unscrupulous promoters. This is not relevant to our situation, but the law does not recognize this. Our loose community of ecstatic drummers and dancers would have to coagulate into a formal organization, with an admission policy, and have private parties somewhere, somehow, in order to not violate this particular law. That so-called remedy, I think, would not really improve anything. It would just create more bureaucratic paper-shuffling.

Something else that I found peculiar was the presumed close connection between dancing and beer. Beer licensing and dance hall licensing go hand in hand. Hey, beer companies sponsor rock n’roll these days, don’ they? I guess I’m kind of old-school, though—to me, alcohol is antithetical to a really good dancing experience, but then the celebratory substances I favor when I’m dancing are thoroughly illegal. Oh, well. It occurs to me that if those substances were legalized under the current paradigm, and regulated by laws similar to the beer laws, it would create a whole new level of legal and legislative red tape. Maybe that’s some of why they’re not legal yet—there’s no way for the system to integrate them, given its negative assumptions about human nature.

This has quite an eye-opener for me. I had no idea how restrictive the laws are in this state. I suspect that some of what drives them is religious fanatacism that figures that if it can’t actually stop drinking and dancing, it will make them as difficult as possible. It’s a trivial issue, compared to so many, but at the same time, it illustrates the dualistic, Byzantine thinking that has been encoded into law under the rubric of the Democrats and the Republicans, and makes it difficult to stage small, semi-spontaneous, low-rent community events—the kind that make a community a community. Want a party that really wants to get government off people’ backs? Want a party that is really liberal? Want a party that really likes to party? Go Green!

music: Ed Haggard and the Love Drums, “Soliwoulen”

Back when Steve Martin did stand up, he liked to talk about taking drugs—hey, it was the seventies, everything was cool, y’know?. “I took this amazing pill last night,” he would say. “It really bleeped me up—it’s called A PLACEBO!”

Fast forward about twenty-five years, to 2002, and Dr. Helen S. Mayberg starts doing research on “the placebo effect” at Emory University. Dr. Mayberg was twenty years old in 1976, and grew up in California. I suspect she dug Steve Martin back in the day.

What Dr. Mayberg found out was that taking placebos does, in fact, alter brain chemistry. Yes, that’s right—placebos can bleep you up! (Though I have to say, I’ve bought a few that didn’t!) But, I digress–if you take a sugar pill that you think is going to make you feel better, there’s a good chance that your brain chemistry will, obligingly, rearrange itself so that you feel better. This shook the foundation of modern neuropharmacology, which had assumed that the adult brain was a steady-state soup that could only be altered by pouring chemicals into it. Dr. Mayberg went on to do a study that showed that engaging depressed individuals in what is called “cognitive therapy,” in which they learn to think their way out of their depressions, is just as effective as medication for many people—and causes changes in brain chemistry that are, in fact, the opposite of the changes induced by medication. Her description of the difference is that medication changes the brain from the bottom up, while therapy changes the brain from the top down. As I understand it, this means that the changes induced by cognitive therapy are permanent, while the changes induced by drug therapy evaporate when an individual stops taking his or her, as they say, “meds.” Meanwhile….

His Holiness the Dalai Lama has long been eager to study Buddhist meditation practices with the tools of modern science, hoping to transform traditional religious practices into secular forms that will benefit people without obliging them to study Sanskrit. He has been fortunate to find many researchers eager to help him out. One center for this activity has been the Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior, at the University of Wisconsin, where Dr. Richard Davidson has found powerful differences between the brains of long-term monks and novice meditators. But many of the differences are differences of degree—the meditators have discovered how to turn on their compassion and problem-solving centers to an unparalleled degree, while novices have just begun to stir these abilities. As with Dr. Mayberg’s work on cognitive therapy, this proves that the way we think does change our brains—positive thinking creates a positive feedback loop that improves functioning, while negative thinking creates negative feedback that…well, you get the picture.

This has enormous implications not just for the treatment of so-called “mental illness,” but for all of us. For the “mentally ill,” it shows that our current, “pill for every ill” way of thinking is just what many patients’ rights groups have claimed it is—a way for the drug companies to sell more pills, not a way that actually benefits those who are suffering. What it suggests to me is that, rather than creating a nation on prescription drugs, we could identify people who would make good cognitive therapy counselors and get them trained up and working with the so-called mentally ill (many of whom only see a “therapist” to get their prescriptions renewed). This would create a community network that in and of itself would be beneficial, not just for the human contacts it would create but because the counselors’ wages would circulate in the community, while drug money goes out to pharmaceutical companies and doesn’t come back.

I believe such community mental health networks would also benefit from the legalization of two classes of drugs now outlawed—marijuana and psychedelics. Marijuana has the effect of loosening habitual neural patterns in the brain (note to my serious readers: the link above does not reference this specific claim—my deadline got in the way of tracking it down, but I know it’s out there, and when I find it, I’ll link it in.) , and, with proper guidance, can be very helpful in changing self-defeating habit patterns. And psychedelic therapy, of course, had a very promising beginning before being shut down, in part by pharmaceutical companies who were averse to pills that they might only have to give a patient once. It’s the repeat business that makes stockholders happy, you know!

That’s the “mental illness” side of the benefits from this research. Now for the “mental wellness.” The meditation studies demonstrate that our brains will grow if we exercise them. There are exercise programs available that will increase our compassion, creativity, mental flexibility, and many other positive qualities, just as there are physical exercise programs—from yoga to aerobics to weight training—that will increase our physical flexibility, endurance, and strength. Members of the network of mental health counselors that I have proposed should be well grounded in these mental exercises, and should be available for wellness counseling as well as illness counseling. Healthy people take aerobics and yoga classes and work out in gyms—we should have the same emphasis on mental discipline, as well, and this broad foundation of mental and physical training should be at the heart of a national health system.

This is a very different emphasis from the proposals floated by most Democrats, let alone Republicans—their major concern seems to be making sure that the insurance and medical/pharmaceutical establishments stay healthy, not the public. That’s what’s politically possible for the two major parties, who are largely supported by these bloated business empires. Sooner or later, they will have to realize that the health and insurance establishment is to the body politic as cancer is to the human body, and that there is no way to make America healthy other than a little surgery. There is such a thing as beneficial corporate downsizing, y’know?

music: Taj Mahal—Giant Step

What do George Bush, Barak Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden have in common? This is not a joke!

They all want to expand ethanol production in the U.S.

And what else do they have in common?

That shows the extent to which none of them are in touch with reality, and the extent to which they are in touch with, f’rinstance, Archer-Daniels Midland, which will benefit from rising corn prices, probably more than the corn farmers will, if history is any guide. Once again, Mr. Bush has shown his proclivity for “solving problems” by benefitting the corporatocracy, and the country’s leading Democrats have shown what whores they are by falling in line behind him, in spite of the fact that we could reduce our fuel usage by mandating higher fuel efficiency for a fraction of the cost of subsidizing ethanol production.

The simple math of turning corn into ethanol should be enough to make anyone with half a brain realize it doesn’t add up. If every single ear of corn grown in the US today were turned into ethanol, it would be enough to supplant—ta da!--twelve percent of our current gasoline usage—and leave no corn left over for corn flakes, corn bread, animal feed, or export to Mexico, which, since NAFTA, has become totally dependent on US corn production, with disastrous unintended consequences, which I’ll discuss later. For now, let’s stick with turning the entire current US corn crop into ethanol.

It takes a lot of water and a lot of natural gas to brew ethanol. Water availability in the midwest is going down, and natural gas prices are going up. At current corn and gas prices, it costs around two dollars a gallon to make ethanol, and uses three gallons of water, on top of the water that is needed to grow the corn. Ethanol advocates talk glibly of “putting another thirty million acres into production,” an area about half the size of Kansas, but where those millions of acres are going to come from is a serious concern—are we going to overturn everybody’s wetland and conservation set-asides and shelterbelts and woodlots and plant them in corn, which is the most erosive, heavy-feeding crop a farmer can grow?

That’s not sustainability, that’s ecological suicide, even without factoring in that it takes more BTU’s to produce ethanol than the ethanol provides—that’s why they use natural gas to brew it—using ethanol to make ethanol would be an out-front losing proposition.

In case you’re wondering, it takes eleven acres of corn to brew enough ethanol to supply the average American car’s fuel needs. That’s enough land to feed seven people for a year…according to one estimate, it would take an area equivalent to 97% of the surface area of the US to grow enough corn to completely switch over to ethanol. Proponents promise more efficient ethanol production from crops and technologies that have yet to be developed. There will also be pie in the sky when we die, and seventy virgins waiting in heaven for every American martyr in Iraq….but, I digress…..

And of course, increased demand for corn would drive up the prices we pay for meat and dairy products, as well as corn flakes, corn meal, and…tortillas. The nascent demand for ethanol has already driven US corn prices to their highest level in decades. Because NAFTA eliminated trade barriers between the US and Mexico, Mexican agriculture was washed away by a flood of then-cheap American corn. Now that the price is going up, the price of tortillas, Mexico’s staple food, has risen by thirty percent in the last three years, sparking food riots. Used to be, when things got tough, Mexicans just headed for El Norte, but with the border tightening up and the economy up here shutting down , Mexico is turning into a time bomb. Can you say, “failed state on our southern border,” boys and girls?

And of course, the disaster called “NAFTA” was foisted on us by the same mainstream coalition of Demopublicans and Republicrats who are now cheering for ethanol, coal gasification, and new nukes. Hey, it’s lining their pockets. Who cares if it tears up the planet? They’re rich enough to insulate themselves from the consequences, and after they die, who cares? Hell, leave the kids holding the bag! That’s the way to build character in young people!

No. The way to build character in young people is to set a good example. We need to redesign our culture—not from the top down, but from the bottom up. We need to create an economy that is not so energy intensive, one in which work and play are local. We need to recreate a culture in which we can either walk or use public transportation to get where we need to go, a culture in which we do not need ever-larger homes for ever-fewer people. We need neighborhoods in which we can share childcare and lawnmowers and garden vegetables—maybe we need to forget about the lawnmowers and keep a few sheep around to graze the lawns and keep everyone in sweaters. We need to forget about stylish new clothes and the latest kitchen gadgets, turn off the air conditioning and quit worrying so much about how we smell. There simply is no way to keep on living as we have been. We can fight it or we can work with it, but sooner or later we’ll have to change, and the sooner and more cheerfully we all do, the better off we’ll all be.

music: Julian Cope, “Ain’t No Gettin’ Round Gettin’ Round“

Just a note on this—the mystery of India’s vanishing vultures has been solved.  Vultures are an important part of the ecology of India, but their numbers have plummeted 97% in recent years and they are in danger of extinction. It’s one of those unintended consequence things–they have been succumbing to liver failure from a pharmaceutical painkiller that Indians have been feeding their cows.  The drug accumulates in the cows, to whom it is not toxic, but the vultures have been eating enough dead cows to get a fatal dose.  Use of the drug has been banned, but it is not clear yet whether the vultures will recover.  Better living through chemistry, eh?

Our Truth in Strange Places Award this month goes to two CEOs who—in vain—begged Mr. Bush to advocate mandatory carbon emissions caps.  Here’s what they said:
Alain Belda, CEO of Alcoa: “We cannot put this problem on the backs of our children and grandchildren. It is a very significant step that we call on the leaders in Washington, the President and members of the United States Congress to take action now and make sure that the planet’s future is protected for future generations.”
Peter Darbee, CEO of Pacific Gas and Electric: “The U.S. has a unique opportunity and a unique responsibility. Our emissions far eclipse that of any other nation in the world and so we are undeniably part of the problem. We also have the wealthiest and the most innovative economy so financially and technologically we are in the best position to help solve the problem.”

The problem is, of course, that Mr. Bush has pissed away our resources and promised away our credit by getting us all tangled up with the Iraqi tar baby.  Now we are unable to extricate ourselves to deal with the B’rer Fox of global warming and the B’rer Bear of global oil depletion.  By crying wolf over Iraq, he has crippled our ability to meet the real challenges that are facing us, and they are not going to be fooled into throwing us into some briar patch—I’m sorry, here the metaphor fails me—global warming and oil depletion are going to have their way with us, and it will not be pretty.

That’s the basic message of the International Panel on Climate Change’s report, which speaks in scientific nuances but basically tells us that the poop has already entered the air intake, and it’s just a question of how long our face is going to get plastered  and how long it will take us to clean it off.  Oh, and by the way, they have no scientific models to deal with the melting of large chunks of ice like the Siberian permafrost and the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Caps, so there’s really no telling how much worse it will get.

Meanwhile, John Edwards, regarded as one of the more sensible Democrats seeking to become President in 2008 (he’s actually got a halfway decent health plan), joined Hillary Clinton in endorsing an Israeli attack on Iran.  Speaking in Israel to a forum on Israeli security, he said, “The challenges in your own backyard – represent an unprecedented threat to the world and Israel.”  Barak Obama, too, not content with pushing coal and nuclear power as solutions to America’s energy crisis, has joined the chorus of those who are warning Iran not to meddle in Iraq, even as it comes to light that the US government has been selling spare jet parts to the Iranians and that Saudi Arabian private citizens are the likely source of the surface-to-air missiles that have been downing US helicopters in Iraq lately.  A bunch of Saudis destroyed the World Trade Center, so we invaded Iraq and Afghanistan.  Now they’re providing weapons to their Sunni brothers in Iraq.  Must be time to invade Iran, eh?  But  I digress…

I bring this up in the same context as global warming because it’s starting to look to me as though, for all their pre-election rhetoric on the subject, the Democrats are going to prove to be as distracted and incapable of intelligent response as the Republicans.  We’ve already seen them sell out the electorate on the war, and I have no doubt that they’ll kowtow to big oil when that becomes appropriate, because they don’t have a clue.

The Repugs have a plan, at least—it’s an evil, perverse plan that involves putting themselves first and the devil take hindmost—but the Democrats keep acting like it’s an honest game while Bush and Cheney use every dirty trick  Herr Gobebbels—I mean, Karl Rove–can dream up. Replacing seasoned Federal Prosecutors with political operatives, placing Republican party commissars in  charge of civil service agencies, the list goes on—having suffered defeat at the polls, Bush and Cheney are working to strengthen the executive branch and do as much damage as they can before they leave office, hoping to hamstring their (presumably) Democratic successor.

There is a life-and-death struggle for control of the Titanic going on here.  I don’t know about you, but I’ve quit waiting for the bigwigs to sort it out.  I’m getting my own lifeboat together.

music: jennifer berezan—the whole world is burning