A High-Five for Washington State

California in general, and San Francisco in particular, are about to lose their cult status among Conservatives as the Mecca of liberal madness as Washington state decriminalizes the possession of marijuana and legalizes same-sex marriages. Wow. Bill O’Reilly is going to bleed out his ears over this. Glenn Beck will need a blackboard the size of a tractor trailer to connect all of the evil dots inherent in this master plot to overthrow his Father Knows Best hallucinations about America.

            As many of us have noted for years, most politicians and the U.S. Government in general are way behind the curve on both of these issues. The war on drugs has been a violent, money-sucking, crime inducing failure from the moment the words were first uttered by Nixon in the seventies. This futile fire has been stoked by a wide array of people and institutions that have no interest in the logic of the policy itself: politicians afraid of looking weak on crime, police departments who take in millions from confiscating money and property from the accused, the prison industry, the wine and beer industries, and the military. Finally, finally, after nearly 40 years of this lunacy, the people are starting to be heard, and despite the bluster from the feds, this is a ship that is simply too big to be turned around.

            This is equally true of same-sex marriage. The incoherent arguments of the Religious Right have lost even their entertainment value as people realize the simple truth that love cannot be confined in archaic parameters imposed by the few on the many.

            I came of age in the 1960s and it was a tumultuous and eventful era full of progress, but I would argue that those of us alive at this moment in time are in the midst of an equally momentous time as we experience the slow and painful demise of the white patriarchal cultural hegemony and enter a new period of progress, equality and acceptance.