Gerald Dillenbeck | + Follow Poet |
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The Town Council Proposal

Some say it began with the Jehovah's Witnesses
ingesting sacred substances with the Rastafarians.
Others say that could not possibly be true or false.

What emerged one sultry August Town Council evening
when half the town had found some sleep:

We believe that direct and indirect health outcomes
derived from use of marijuana
are more family and community-friendly
than use of alcohol producing more pathological outcomes;
and that our economic and political policies
and procedures in public affairs,
as in private,
should reflect this shared sacred ecological belief.

Further, because we find little outcome evidence that consumption of THC
is less healthy and more pathological than ingesting alcohol,
and because we find bucket lists of evidence that THC can have therapeutic and far less addictive pathological outcomes than alcoholic beverage consumption,
we find it ecopolitically curious
that regulatory and legal support evinces more tolerance of alcohol Business as Usual
than THC busyness as sometimes unusual.

Such disparity of regulations and legal posturing
appear to suffer from Constitutional Rights Defiance Disorder,
as we compassionately expect our public sector and structures
to positively support what evinces health,
happiness,
and cooperative prosperity for all,
rather than their suppression,
making depressants more accessible than known
ecologically organic regenerative substances,
to toast the less organic degeneratively pathological substance,
which, in excess, is a poison causing death,
as compared to a more biotherapeutic holistic medicine
that has much longer,
and more spiritually,
withstood and contemplated tests of flowing nutritional time.

I cannot say from where this proposal came
but I can report why the Council passed the pipe to think about
what they could say that might fit with their own experience.

Most people learn most and best from personal experience,
we figured,
especially if we have a chance to reflect together on those experiences,
which we might choose to do right now.

Most people's attitudes and feelings and beliefs
about health v pathology are influenced most by their own experience,
including the intake of substances,
like foods we eat,
and like or don't prefer,
like beverages we drink and like or don't,
and prefer nutritionally and tastefully,
like sensory outcomes of drinking alcohol and inhaling THC.

Most Business As Usual fundamentalists,
especially of the Christian and Islamic varieties,
believe alcohol is more or less not health viable
for beneficial ecopolitical outcomes, 
as perhaps more favorably compared to THC.
However, most Christian and Islamic fundamentalists
do not have personal experience of either,
nor do they tend to share within families and communities
likely to learn from others' experiential wisdoms
extending out to broader families and friends of friends.

Sadly, up to this PostMillennial time,
where there have been exceptions to such dually undiagnostic abstinence,
these have been on the side of not-quite-so evangelical cocktails.

Had we sooner leaned the other way,
inhaling THC
then talking about cooperative ecopolitically healthy outcomes
while exhaling,
well, then,
we might begin warming toward each other
and those still outside our monocultural religious walls 
of self-protectionism.

As it is,
our spiritual and divine aspirations suffer
from lack of connection with our Eros-loving bodies
and lack of ecologically cooperative empowering WinWin thinking,
and ecotherapeutic climate building,
as in the newer testament gospels for community development,
transubstantiations,
transliterations,
and like those polypathic potheads over at the UU and Zen Center,
and don't even get us started
on how much fun we had with the Rastafarian Warrior Witnesses.

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