Pot not lame

[Re: “Criticize it,” Riff-Raff, Nov. 22 ’07] This is for Raf Katigbak, in particular his comment, “Has it ever occurred to pot activists that society doesn’t want to accept marijuana consumption because it’s actually kind of lame?”

I completely understand your negative feelings on the whole “lameness” some potheads seem to have towards society’s standards. But excuse me for saying, your article seemed to be targeted at boys (maybe some girls) ages 15 and under.

I’m a stay-at-home-pothead-mom, and am in college part time getting my master’s in psychology. I have two children in school, then football practice afterwards, I cook dinner six nights a week, and make sure the laundry is done, the kitchen is swept and baths are given each and every night. I’ve been married for seven years to a man who also likes to smoke pot.

Now, I don’t just smoke once a year like you... I smoke every day, three times a day. So do all of our friends, and not one of us have bongs shaped like Homer’s head lying around our house.

Nor do we wear Alien t-shirts that say...“have a spaced out day.” We don’t have Cat in the Hat hats, and we don’t own any silly coasters, listen to the Grateful Dead or stare at our hands because we are stoned out of our minds.

If I met you and told you I smoked pot, would you automatically categorize me as lame? I would hate that (even if I probably do have a few lame things laying around my house that have to do with pot). I thought your article was a little ignorant since you don’t know exactly who smokes pot. Not all of us are lame, or do lame things ’cause we like to smoke.

Maybe you should have said that your article was directed to little kids who have now destroyed what “society” thinks of potheads. Don’t conform just because you don’t understand it as a whole.

>> S.A.

God not dead

[Re: “Down with God,” Letters, June 19] When John Dirlik claims religion is the product of fear or terror or puzzlement or dread, he’s only dealing with our reactions to negative aspects of existence and overlooking reactions of hope or delight or appreciation or peace, which relate to the positive aspects.

More importantly, he’s forgetting what the great Schweitzer called “reverence for life,” an emotional state as fundamental as anxiety. So if we must find the origin of religion, it makes more sense to boil it down to something both positive and negative: sheer amazement.

J.C. Powys once wrote: “There is a deep, strange, unaccountable response within us to the mystery of life and the mystery of death; and this response subsists below grief and pain and misery and disappointment, below all care and all futility.”

This response is the strength of wonder. And after every other more desperate religious feeling subsides, this wonder remains.

>>L.S. Cattarini

God nearly dead

[Re: “Resurrecting God,” Letters, June 26] Paul Kokoski proclaims that, “common sense tells us that there has to be a First Cause.” Inexplicably, God is exempt from that requirement. Ah, but yes: the spirit moves in mysterious ways.

Religion will surely meet its demise, though regrettably only in the distant future. Die it will, not strangled by state banishment, but peacefully of old age. Like an ugly fad whose time has passed, it will quietly vanish into oblivion, leaving behind only embarrassing memories.

When at last this happens, it will be tempting to list the horrors of its life and the travesties committed in its name. But that would be in poor taste. Far more polite to extol the occasional good deed, orphanages in Africa or aid packages to victims of droughts and tsunamis.

Like eulogizing a paedophile uncle, better not to dwell on the pain he caused and instead recall his sense of humour and the kindness he showed his dog.

The funeral, however, is still far away. The thing still lives, and any respect owed to the departed remains unwarranted. While secular movements have spawned Stalin and the Third Reich, their atrocities were not the result of disbelief in deities but of radical experiments in social engineering.

It is Believers who kill. Harmless as individuals, collectively the faithful morph into leviathans, all the more destructive since they regard themselves divinely ordained.

Buyers beware.

>> John Dirlik

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