Erik Estrada is more popular than pot

About a year and a half ago, we here at the central office were amazed to see the blog traffic at Latino Like Me start to reach new peaks, at times even exceeding 1000 a day.  When we checked the data from the Chicano super-computer we have working out back, it turned out the bulk of that traffic was coming from people searching for terms like “marijuana” and “marijuana joint” and “pot.”

This kept up for sometime, easily contributing an extra hundred or so visitors a day after the highest peaks.  Two posts, which were inadvertently optimized, drove the surge.  This was reflected in the data, as this post on Michael Phelps and corn flakes and this one on “420” rose to the top of LLM’s “all-time” list.

As I’ve mentioned before, I didn’t mind this discovery but I did find it a bit disheartening that the many posts I spent a lot of thoughtful energy and compassion composing—posts about immigration, hate crimes, and racial equity—got eclipsed by little posts I wrote on the fly for fun.

In the past month, however, I seem to have fallen out of favor with the pot smokers of the interwebs.  Lately it’s not unheard of for LLM to get zero hits from pot-related searches.  As these have gone down, a new “king” has emerged.  It doesn’t drive quite the same traffic in terms of numbers, but the daily share it provides is consistent.

That’s right: Erik Estrada now drives the bulk my blog hits.

I feel like a young boy whose wildest dreams have come true.

Four Twenty

Today is an underground holiday, of sorts.  Nobody knows when it started, or how it started, but, I assure you, more people than you can imagine will partake in it.

“Four Twenty” (or 4:20 or 4/20) is something of an urban legend, (sub)cultural joke, and community-building practice all rolled into one.  (Hehehehe, he said “rolled.”)  For those of you who don’t know (and, really, if you found this, you do) it refers to a time of day (and, annually, a day of the year) when people are supposed to get high by smoking or otherwise consuming marijuana.

Depending on the generation “observing” the feast, it has been alternately a form of collective political rebellion (thumbing one’s nose at a law prohibiting the very celebration in question); a mark of a distinctive generational status (“we” get high but “they” didn’t); and a form of nurturing an “imagined” community (no matter where you are, if you get high at 4:20 or at 4:20 on 4/20 then you are not getting high alone).

As with any cultural phenomena based more on rumor and humor than on any single historical event, there’s no particular reason for this.  Legend has it that 4-20 is the part of the criminal code somewhere which makes smoking pot a crime.  It’s not, but that doesn’t stop the story from being told from one generation to the next.  Others have (more recently) linked it to urban legends about happenings at high schools (the time detention got out at one; the locker number of where one dealt the contraband at another).  I suspect the events at Columbine in 1999 may have had something to do with linking it in the collective memory to some kind of high school rebellion, but those rumors, too, are just that.

The tradition continues, however, as it probably will for the, well, forever.  As somebody who works on a college campus, I am never surprised to see the “next” generation’s participation in this version of “pot culture.”  Ten years from now, most of those doing what they’re doing, will either be non-smokers remembering their youthful indiscretions, teetotalers trying to get the “drugs away from our children,” or addicts.

Which will you be?  Huh?  Yeah, I’m talking to you.  Imagine that!  Me!  Talking to you!!  And we’ve never even met!!!  And you’re just sitting there, at your computer, with all that belly-button lint!!  And I’m using so many exclamation marks!  Did you ever notice how that word was spelled: e-x-c-l-a-m-a-t-i-o-n.  The word “clam” is in there?  And “mation”!  My god, I have to Google search “mation”!!

But, today, they were people who alter their mental state by imbibing an herb that modern U.S. society has decided to criminalize.

And now, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, Broadway legend CAROL CHANNING!!!!

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The Oppression We Condone

Imagine a young, college student loading a bong and taking a hit. Then, imagine somewhere else, another person bites into a salad and swallows a small tomato. Neither person thinks they are hurting anyone by their actions. Neither thinks for a moment their action is connected to other people.

But both are wrong.

Two tragic articles bring this home. The first is a piece on the drug war in Mexico, featured in the latest issue of Foreign Policy.

“Mexico’s hillbilly drug smugglers have morphed into a raging insurgency. Violence claimed more lives there last year alone than all the Americans killed in the war in Iraq. And there’s no end in sight.”

It is a sad reminder of the brutal human cost that comes with the criminalization of drugs and drug use, yes, but it is also damning of U.S. consumption.  Even if marijuana and other drugs were legal in the U.S., the scale of our consumption would still create and nurture many of the power dynamics currently at play in the hemisphere.

If you doubt that, read this article on the production of tomatoes in South Florida. Featured in Gourmet magazine, it details the presence of modern slavery in the U.S.

“If you have eaten a tomato this winter, chances are very good that it was picked by a person who lives in virtual slavery. “

This perfectly legal food is  produced in ways which view their Latino laborers as nothing more than an ingredient to production, like dirt, water, or seed.  While this situation is both simple and complicated, the suffering is undeniable.

Halting our consumption of items which produce human suffering is a small change anybody can make.  Consumption feeds the continuation of the systems in question, both of which exact immeasurable human costs.  But that won’t do much to change the real problem.

James Baldwin once wrote of the indifference of whites to black suffering saying “It is their innocence that constitutes the crime.” What he meant is that “not knowing” isn’t a sign of innocence. Not when we live in a world where suffering is so easily evident.  Instead, it’s a sign of our guilt because it is the product of effort–effort to not know, effort to not associate yourself as linked to another you know is in pain, effort to preserve your need (for whatever) at the cost of others’ needs for human dignity and life.

When we open our eyes and see that the suffering of others is our suffering, then we are prepared to begin the hard work of creating the kinds of change called for in these situations.  What would you do to stop the abuse of your brother?  What would you do to save the life of your sister?

The article in Gourmet came to my attenton via Harvesting Justice, the wonderful blog of the non-profit advocacy group Farmworker Justice.

If it weren’t for pot, who would eat Corn Flakes?

Kellogg–the maker of tasty cereals which are slowly killing our entire nation in a sea of obesity–has decided not to renew their contract with Michael Phelps after this picture and this admission occupied the media this week.

Phelps had appeared on boxes of Frosted Flakes and Corn Flakes as part of his contract with the Michigan-based company.  In the story from AP, the cereal giant says Phelps’ pot smoking is “not consistent with the image of Kellogg.”

I’m not exactly sure what the purveyor of Pop Tarts, Fruit Loops, Cheez-Its, and the entire Keebler line of snacks thinks their image is but, I assure you, marijuana is not a threat to it.  The creation of a snack line supposedly made by elves living in a tree is a veritable testament to stoner brilliance.  Why I can’t think of anything more stoney, except for maybe little frosted dough cakes you can warm in a toaster.

If I ate cereal I would organize a boycott of Kellogg on principle.  (Or just forego the whole damned industry and make my own marijuana-based cereals!)
Knowing the tastiness of their products, I am sure stoners won’t get around to it.  BUT, my dear partakers of the sacred smoke!  The next time you are mixing Corn Flakes, peanut butter, and those left over chocolate chips you found in the pantry, remember what that sugary grain dealer thinks of you.

Remember what?

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