The US rose to eminence by producing value, and by a fair percentage of citizens sharing the wealth. The further the nation has been corrupted from the stability of fairness, the faster our rate of decline. Runaway greed, lust for power, and raw capitalism have reversed our national trajectory so insidiously that not just we, but even Earth’s biosphere, are in free fall. Is it more than simple coincidence that such comprehensive decline so closely parallels our prohibition of hemp?
Sure, there was a glitch 5 years after hemp was banned as the evil weed with roots in hell. Top government officials still insist, forcefully, that there is no difference between “marijuana” and industrial hemp. With that in mind, please compare marijuana propaganda and hysteria that heralded hemp prohibition and haunts us to this day, with the government’s own film, Hemp for Victory, produced in 1942. We needed hemp to “win” WWII, so under duress, the feds resorted to truth.
So what changed in those 5 years? Certainly not hemp, exactly the same resource extraordinaire that has served humanity for at least 12,000 years. Priorities changed, propaganda changed. And hemp didn’t change when the war ended and hemp reverted to our enemy. You might wonder, whose enemy?
Arguably, hemp is the most useful member of the entire plant kingdom. So how could nature’s premier converter of sunshine and water into value, a superstar of the biosphere and powerful supporter of life on Earth be considered an enemy?
War is our enemy. Nobody wins in war, everybody loses — except the “money changers”. Ever since Jesus ran them out of the Temple with a whip (remember him, the Prince of Peace?), they have relentlessly, progressively embedded as a certain subspecies—psychopaths born without conscience, without any sense of right or wrong, without a soul; beings to whom truth and justice are alien concepts, to be in any way so much as acknowledged only under extreme duress. So yes, all of humanity loses in war, there are no winners. And coincidence has nothing to do with those at the root of hemp prohibition being the same as those who have blessed us with perpetual war.
Greed is Not Good
Remember “Morning in America” (mourning?) when “greed is good” pealed like church bells? Reaganomics was born that morning. Even after decades of wealth gushing ever upward, hardly any of it ever seems to trickle back down. Imagine that, shucks, the whole concept sounds so… Reagan. Millions of fossil Americans can still get misty at any mention of “Dutch”.
Despite reality (real reality, not Bush, or reality TV kinds), the GOP (repugnantcan party) clings tenaciously to this fiendish canard even as we approach midnight in America. Trickle-down theory, Reaganomics.
Greed is the glue that sticks wealth to wherever it rises. Greed is also the essence that keeps hemp our enemy. Hemp has every potential to spread wealth down through the workers who actually create wealth, potential to energize regional economies—perfect antidote to the plague of globalization, that concentrator of wealth into, as George H. W. Bush described, “…higher, tighter and righter hands.” Same hands now steering humanity toward hell; hands with the stickiest fingers, and the greatest distance from those passé concepts: humanity, and commonwealth—or common good.
War Is All Hell
Keeping track of all our current wars gets increasingly difficult, especially with CorpoMedia so focused on future targets, such as Iran, Pakistan, Syria, Lebanon, Russia, China — even, as certain tea-party princesses have said, the “country” of Africa.
After so much of our manufacturing base has been gutted, fully one third of it within the first decade of “America’s century” (four-fifths of that during the Bush/Cheney nightmare); and with so many other good jobs herded offshore, it might seem that war and financialization are becoming our primary industries. Plunder and casino, rape and manipulation, destruction and parasitism, murder and financial malignancy; the future is so bright we’ve gotta wear headlamps.
The farcical War on Terror is a dream come true for the money changers. The war against a ghost that could never surrender because it’s, well, a ghost. Forever war. And the slimiest war mongers of all feverishly masquerade as hardcore fundamentalist Christians. The Prince of Peace would puke.
Almost seems we can’t engage anything without declaring war on it. And talk about (intentionally?) miserable aim. The War on Terror, besides being a lurid excuse for pirating resources, especially oil, and “spreading freedom and democracy”, it cloaks a maniacal assault on our Constitution (with or without “boots on the ground”) to render the US a police state. Such irony might have only one viable competitor….
The War on Drugs
Somehow, it might not seem quite so bad, a government waging war against its own people to eliminate the scourge of drug abuse; but when that same government is the world’s top drug trafficker — rather exceeds the term irony, transcending into the Twilight Zone.
If more people knew how much the Taliban’s eradication of opium poppy production had to do with why we invaded Afghanistan, and have stretched it out to our longest war ever — well, it probably wouldn’t matter.
It’s sensible business, filling our increasingly-privatized prison system with marijuana smokers to capitalize on a huge, reliable slave-labor pool. And after all, as president Calvin Coolidge said:
“The business of America is business.”
Bad business is one thing, but, the worst business, guess that’s why we’re Number One. When you’re the Boss, anything you might say or do is right; hard right, nowadays, as hard as the righteous wing cherry-picking scripture…and through the most twisted, tortuous exegesis, all but actually saying—indeed, platforming: “In the beginning, God created corporations….”
Of course that’s not quite correct. Hemp came way before corporations. Hemp is even older than money — has actually been used as money, the real kind, not faith-based money (fiat). In early America, taxes could be paid in hemp. Nowadays our tax dollars feed the rounding up of marijuana offenders and packing them into work prisons. Yes, our taxes perpetuate the drug war cash cow (that would wither without marijuana), and insure that hemp will not threaten the status quo in this corporate-controlled home of Big Oil.
Wisdom Versus Cleverness
Our star, Sol, the sun, it gives us all the real-time energy we might ever need. The challenge is harvesting that energy as elegantly as with growing hemp. Luckily, or perhaps exactly the opposite for us — and even more unluckily for our progeny — Earth has been very good at fixing solar energy into fossil energy.
Millions of years worth of solar energy mostly sequestered from the biosphere; toxic, biocidal energy, black death safely isolated from Earth’s life processes. Perhaps fossil energy is some grand test of human wisdom, along the lines of: If you’re clever enough to significantly tap fossil energy, are you wise enough not to disrupt the biosphere with it?
Cleverness is plentiful — the human brain is magnificent, except for the wisdom deficiency, which so dependably invites disaster. Cleverness often breeds destruction; wisdom involves nurture, greater awareness and esteem for what gave us life and keeps life going, and utmost respect for the future. Wisdom versus cleverness influences being born into heaven, or hell.
Wisdom feeds the creation of value. Cleverness too often engenders a world controlled by parasites who create no value, but instead, employ every form of violence, murder, destruction and manipulation to usurp value from those who create value. Hemp is a paragon of wisdom — of fitting perfectly into and furthering Earth’s living energy systems. Hemp could shield the wisdom in humanity from the parasitical cleverness driving us down the road of perpetual war, toward utter biospheric collapse.
Where will we, and the rest of Earth’s species live after human cleverness collapses our biosphere?
For at least 12,000 years, humanity’s wisdom embraced hemp as an indispensable ally. For 74 years (except for those few years of Hemp For Victory!), cleverness in this nation now become the greatest parasite the world has ever seen has kept hemp our enemy. But wisdom hangs on in the more than 30 countries treating hemp as the supreme natural resource it has always been. Those countries feed the annual $450 million retail hemp business in this country — business living exclusively on imported raw materials.
Nothing compares with hemp in terms of powering good jobs that cannot be offshored — millions of acres of hemp, an agricultural revolution creating an expanding spectrum of gainful employment. Nothing could touch hemp in terms of impacting the near total dominance of corporations in virtually every aspect of modern America.
Hemp offers many thousands of superior products that perpetuate living systems, instead of killing them as the fossil-energy empire is doing — a whole new industry of vast scope, creating value, virtually independent of the corporate fossil empire. Only hemp has such fantastic potential to wrest power from the parasites and spread it among their victims. Hemp could turn Power to the People from a trampled cliché, into glory!
If you believe that marijuana realistically had anything to do with the prohibition of industrial hemp farming in this world’s most powerful parasite, please try to not judge me too harshly. I’m simply advocating wisdom.