Words&Dirt

“A stranger hurrying as fast as he could over the icy sidewalks looked in. He saw a circle of singing people bathed in the clean white light from a tree, and his heart did a somersault, and the image stayed with him; it merged with him even as he came home to his own children, who were already sleeping in their beds, to his wife crossly putting together the tricycle without the screwdriver that he’d run out to borrow. It remained long after his children ripped open their gifts and abandoned their toys in puddles of paper and grew too old for them and left their house and parents and childhoods, so that he and his wife gaped at each other in bewilderment as to how it had happened so terribly swiftly. All those years, the singers in the soft light in the basement apartment crystallized in his mind, became the very idea of what happiness should look like.”

––Fates and Furies, by Lauren Groff, pg. 75

“There’s nothing more hypocritical than a progressive who supports prohibition, unless it’s a conservative who supports prohibition.

Prohibition undermines states’ rights, empowers criminals, expands the nanny state, wastes tax dollars, retards free enterprise, reduces productivity, and puts health-care decisions in the hands of the federal government. It stops the creation of new jobs and investment opportunities, restricts freedom of religion, and violates the right to life.

When we look back at the last forty years of social change in the United States, we see real progress on most of the issues my generation brought to the foreground: the rampant military-industrial complex, civil rights, gay rights, women’s liberation, the environmental movement, the whole-food movement, and the reclaiming of health care. Cannabis reform is just one of the constellation of social-justice movements championed by the baby-boom generation. None of those movements are going away. They’re being mainstreamed and are changing the world.”

––The Cannabis Manifesto: A New Paradigm for Wellness, by Steve DeAngelo, pg. 153