Working Class Corner Holiday Season Letter
From: Russell Scott Day/Founder of Transcendia
Dear Readers,
As we of our Western Culture come from a Christian Spiritual Season that co-opted a holiday season that came from a common need for a holiday simply due to the common influence of the weather on us.
When I lived down in Florida I sort of thought people went a bit crazier there than other places where I had lived like Chicago, or Toronto, or North Carolina, and New York because the seasons were less demarked.
It is not surprising that a year comprised of Summer and Hurricane Season would have general influence on the shared consciousness.
To get through the winter you really need some days off and a bang of food to get through it.
Whether or not God exists, since the boss might not on his own give you a few days off you might be encouraged to invent God so as to get some time off.
At any rate it is the Holiday Season around where I am and what I want is Peace and Joy in the world.
There are ongoing wars, and potential wars that threaten my work.
I wouldn’t mind dying so much if I thought my work might survive.
Every now and then I get out or come across and read my father’s short stories or his play, or his war journal.
I love, respect, and understand my father more and more the longer I live.
I try and take care of his work and have discovered it mixed in with my own work.
He was a combat soldier during the Holiday Season in the Battle of the Bulge, and I am sad for all soldiers in this Season stationed in battle zones.
Seems like the United States has exported its Drug War to me when I think of Police Work in LA, or NYC.
I don’t feel as sad about the Police since they get to go home at night and I would have been a very good Policeman if pot was legal, since even when I imagine myself or have not liked to smoke pot, I would never arrest anyone for possessing it.
Peace is impossible when the laws are unjust and strip others of equality.
Peace pivots on very simple things.
An abundance of food is number one.
Number two is equality.
My mother says, "No shame in honest work."
It is terrible and a source of conflict that under international law drugs that are produced in Afganistan are illegial.
Everything has gone to hell in Iraq over oil, and all to hell in Afganistan because of drugs.
The prospect of international peace does depend on legalizing trade in drugs between Amsterdam and Afganistan more than what President Bush thinks God told him.
Hell, President Bush is the classic dry drunk from what I know about drinking and reformed drunks who don’t go to AA.
AA is a terriffic example of a successful anarchy in crisis management.
As far as peace is concerned and the President Bush is concerned, I’d expect a good decision if he started drinking again, or went to AA meetings instead of Cabinet meetings.
Of course my hero, flawed like a man, is Ulyesses Grant.
I love to drink beer and smoke pot, and my favorite drug is hashish, and at least beer is legal.
Last time in my life hashish was plentifully available in the US was when Carter’s CIA allowed it in prior to Congressional Approval of Military Aide to Afganistan.
It is then that hashish ought to have been legalized.
My addiction to nicotine is where all the founding wealth of the United States came from.
If it wasn’t for morphine after my fall to the concrete through the open stairwell, and when my small intestines became blocked it is hard to believe I could have survived the agony.
So really morphine that comes from poppy and can also be heroin which might be useful at the painful end and comes from Afganistan needs to be legalized along with equality for women regardless of what anyone thinks.
And that is my Holiday Season letter so far today.
Love, Russell
the pragmatist like William James, sort of.