AGREEING TO THE COMMON BLINDNESS
By Dalton Roberts
My Sunday Journal
IPS Features
1-3-10
Gerald Rosen said, “A culture can be defined as a group of people that agrees to be blind in the same way.”
He is so right. What culture is there in the world that is not blind in some way. There a place in India where people gather and throw rocks at each other one day of the year. Many of them die. There are cultures where they put a big bone under your lower lip to make your lip huge. They think it makes you beautiful!
Look at the Jewish practice of circumcision. If you wait until a man is grown and ask, “May I cut off part of your penis?” he will know you are crazy and he will be crazy if he lets you do it.
America has many blindnesses. We’re just now trying to provide health care to our people. Other countries have had it for decades. I don’t care for the bill they are trying to pass but some plan should be in place for our people.
Look at our laws on alcohol and marijuana. You can pull up to a liquor store and buy hundreds of fifths of hard whiskey but you cannot grow even one plant of marijuana in your garden. It is insane.
I played in nightclubs for decades and I can positively tell you that people behave much more peacefully on marijuana than on liquor.
Half of our citizens walk around in a prescription drug haze. All you need to do is find a doctor who will write you one. I know a musician who has a half dozen doctors he rotates among to keep himself on different kinds of highs. He even has names for his highs.
The most intolerable drug addict you will ever have in your band is a cocaine, crack or meth addict but the good news is they won’t drive you nuts for long. They will either die or crash. The next worse addict is a prescription pill popper. One drove me right off the stage and out the door.
I read an article on our drug culture by a scientist and his basic tenet was that people have always loved to be high and they will forever want to be high. They do not realize that the best highs are the result of following a spiritual practice.
He says animals are the same. He said jimson weed gives cows a little buzz and when they hit a little patch of it, it will take a few minutes to kick in. When it does, he says the cow will return to the plant for another buzz. Birds get high on certain berries and will fly like maniacs.
My purpose here is not to endorse any drug but to show how we have agreed to be blind in he same way by making some legal and others illegal. And if you want to know how we got in this situation it is spelled m-o-n-e-y. Drug lords want prices to stay high and are in cahoots with the advertising and alcohol industries to keep alcohol legal and other drugs illegal. By electing their politicians, they have succeeded in keeping enough Americans blind to achieve their purposes.
Maybe that’s why Jesus was so dubious about “the world” -- the Bible’s description for society or our culture. Maybe that’s why we are urged, “Be not conformed to the world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”
Use your mind to keep from going blind.
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Erie Canal reflections.
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