Better People

Someone who left a comment in LoCO’s “Thunderdome” last week thought I showed poor judgment in who I associate with because I have friends who are “homeless.” I realize that “homeless” is a bigoted term, as is the term “dope yuppies” which I also used to describe other friends of mine. I don’t usually talk about my friends in such pejorative terms, but in the context of the piece, those terms brought their legal, economic, and political status into focus. I used the term “homeless” to emphasize the level of disenfranchisement and prejudice my friends endure.

I didn’t use the term because I think they are bad people, quite the opposite. Most of the good, decent and interesting people in Southern Humboldt lack adequate housing, or are subject to the fickle whims of SoHum’s notorious slumlords. On the other hand, the real monsters in this community all seem to have nice, comfortable, stable homes. Gary Lee Bullock is a good example of the kind of people who live in nice homes, and come from respected SoHum families.

Gary Lee Bullock was high on meth, as usual, and started terrorizing his neighbors, who called the cops. He fought with the cops, who arrested him and took him to jail in Eureka. In Eureka, they charged him, booked him, and released him on his own recognizance. After that, while aimlessly wandering the streets of Eureka in the middle of the night, Bullock broke into the rectory of St. Bernard’s Catholic Church, and then tortured and killed Father Eric Freed, the Priest who lived there, before stealing Father Freed’s car and driving it back to his cozy SoHum home.

Zachary Brown makes a fine example as well, last Fall, Zachary, and a teenage accomplice beat an old man they did not know, almost to death, in the Garberville Town Square, with baseball bats. Zachary then walked back to his comfortable Garberville abode, leaving a trail of his victim’s blood all the way to the front door.

Then there’s Estelle Fennell, who works tirelessly to undermine the rights of poor people with new laws that criminalize poverty, ignores violent crime, as long as it is directed against poor people, and who appointed an unqualified Public Defender to make it even easier to railroad poor people into false convictions. These are the kind of people who have homes in Southern Humboldt. How could the people without homes be any worse?

 

I know that we have a few decent people living indoors here in Southern Humboldt, and a lot more who think they are decent people, and probably would be decent people, if they lived somewhere that encouraged them in that way, but if you are looking for genuinely decent, interesting people, you have a better chance of finding them among the people who pay rent, or can’t find a place to rent, than you do among the landed gentry.

That’s why I advocate for affordable housing and better treatment of the poor. I don’t do it out of charity. I do it because we need better people in SoHum. We need better people in SoHum, not richer people, or greedier people. We need better people, and better people have better things to do than squeeze bloody profits out of political corruption. Better people aren’t afraid of honest work, but they don’t want to work themselves to death either. Better people have better things to do. Nonetheless, better people deserve to be treated like human beings, and they deserve an affordable place to live.

The more we do to make life easier for people at the bottom end of the economic spectrum, the easier we make life for everyone, and the more attractive we make it for better people, and that’s how we build a better community. The problem is: the people at the top of the economic scale don’t see it that way.

Greed is a character flaw. It’s a kind of blindness connected to an inferiority complex. Greed creates a yawning chasm of need that enslaves greedy people who always want more. It comes across as pitifully coarse and shallow. Greed is insatiable, and it makes greedy people insufferable, and that’s a large part of the problem around here.

Greed takes a further toll when greedy bosses inevitably try to squeeze more work out of their employees. Overworked, poorly treated workers become bitter and resentful. Instead of resenting their greedy bosses, who they continue to suck-up to, they resent anyone who doesn’t work as hard as they do. Overwork tends to make people dull, and bitterness and resentment are not exactly attractive.

Finally, greed creates poverty. The needfulness of the greedy drives them to exploit the underclass, mercilessly, and the bitter resentment of overworked workers gets expressed in punitive attitudes and overt hostility towards the poor. Greedy people are too stingy to share, and resentful people like to see other people suffer, Together they they maximize the destructive power of poverty and inequality to destroy the lives of good people. Then they complain about all of the traumatized, and addicted people lying around who have no respect for this community.

You see how greed can really undermine the quality of the people, and the quality of life, in any community, but the black market in marijuana adds a whole new dimension to the sick, death-spiral of greed here in Southern Humboldt. As long as we remain focused on squeezing every last dollar out of each other, things are just going to get worse around here. On the other hand, everything we do to make this community more livable for people who don’t enslave themselves to greed, or work themselves to death, makes this community a better place to live, and tends to attract better people.

Skipping “The News”

I’ve been taking a break from “the News” lately, pretty much since the election. It just got too embarrassing to watch. Trump turned US politics into a reality TV show, and I’m only willing to dumb down so far. I figure that if anything important happens, someone will tell me. I have that trust because people tell me about it even when nothing important happens. It really surprises me how much people talk about national politics around here.

I mean, my dope yuppie friends have no respect for the law, and don’t pay income tax, but somehow feel invested in American democracy, and talk about it all the time. My homeless friends, on the other hand, suffer human and civil rights violations every day, get treated like second-class citizens, and endure daily harassment from law enforcement, but they are outraged that Russian hackers compromised the legitimacy of “our elections.” “The News” does this to people.

“The News” is the one thing that truly unites us as a nation. We learn to ignore our own reality in order to digest, internalize and regurgitate this unified national narrative we call “the News.” We have news 24/7/365 so that you never have to think about your own life. “The News” is always there for you, telling you what’s important, what you should think about, and how you should think about it, and because we follow “the News” so faithfully, “the News” defines our national debate, and sets our national agenda. By paying such close attention to “the News,” instead of what’s going on around us, we allow the media, corporate interests and lawmakers to ignore our reality as well.

Doesn’t it seem strange that “the News” gives you updates on all of the major stock indices, every half-hour at least, even though most of us don’t own stocks, and if we do, they are managed by someone else, in a 401K, mutual fund, or retirement account, so the information is not that relevant to that many people. On the other hand, why don’t we have up-to-date stats that tell us about our general well-being as a community. Why don’t they tell us, at 8:00am every morning, how many people slept outside that night? Tell us how many people had nothing to eat yesterday. Show us how people make ends meet. Why would anyone care whether the stock market was going up, if these indices keep sliding?

Instead, we let “the News” tell us how many people we have to throw overboard to buoy the economy, as gauged by the stock market. “The News” tells us why we should expect to lose our home if we get sick, and “the News” tells us why we should sacrifice our children to protect the investments of billionaires, but now “the News” has gone too far.

Today, “The News” is telling us to pay attention to Donald Trump. This goes beyond selling the American people on ridiculous ideas that work against their own interests. Paying attention to Trump amounts to stupidity for stupidity’s sake. Paying attention to Trump is like reading The Enquirer. You know that it is a waste of time, and that you are not learning anything, and that it won’t do any good to point out the inconsistencies in their stories, because telling the truth has never mattered to either of them. Why waste your life that way?

From my perspective, as a writer, “the News” helps me gauge what I can assume my readers know, and what rhetoric they are familiar with, but I don’t want to think about that anymore. I don’t want to know how dumb people have gotten these days, and listening to Trump isn’t going to make them any smarter. I thought a Trump presidency would be a goldmine for political satire, at least, but I don’t find Trump very funny at all. Satirizing Trump is like trying to satirize pro-wrestling. How do you make fun of someone who already makes a mockery of the office?

In many ways, Trump is already the perfect satirical president. He’s got the ego, the chauvinism, the poor taste and the obnoxiousness that everyone despises about America and Americans. He treats other people the way the US treats other countries, and he’s fat, ugly and vain, just like most Americans.

He’s really the perfect president because he so completely embodies what the United States stands for. When you realize that, you begin to understand that our problems are much deeper than our current president, and you won’t find the answers to them on “the News.”

 

Besides, we’ve got plenty of corrupt, greedy fascists right here in Humboldt County. Here, we talk about the Fascist in Chief, in Mara Lago, chiefly because we don’t want to talk about all of the sleazy shit that goes on around here. In that sense, talking about Trump is kind of like talking about the weather. Trump is what you talk about when you don’t want to talk about anything. Mostly, people don’t want to talk about anything, because that would require them to think about something, formulate an opinion about it, and invest enough of themselves in that opinion to state it out loud. I’m not sure that people have it in them anymore.

Nobody wants to talk about the housing crisis. Nobody wants to talk about the dead bodies and the missing people, the violent crime, the opiate crisis, the Hep-C epidemic, the human rights abuses and institutional violence going on right here in Humboldt County, stuff we could actually do something about Nobody wants to talk about those things because nobody wants to think about those things, because mostly, they’re too busy scheming their own next crime against humanity. Instead, they tell me what Trump did, because they saw it on “the News.”

Humboldt’s Economic Potential

While pot industry shills like Hezekiah Allen warn of mass unemployment and economic hardship without continued taxpayer subsidized price supports for marijuana, we should realize by now that drug dealers will say anything to keep the cash rolling in. In truth, government price support programs for marijuana don’t support our local economy, here in Humboldt County, so much as they suppress it.

The War on Drugs created a windfall of profits for anyone who produces marijuana. This windfall buried our real economic potential, which we never really developed because pot paid so much better. We’ve become a marijuana mono-culture dependent on corrupt politicians, violent cops and greedy drug dealers all working together to exploit and oppress the American people. That’s not an economy; that’s a crime. Besides, most of the so-called “jobs” in the marijuana industry, aren’t even considered part of the economy.

 

Most people who make a living from marijuana, don’t pay into Social Security, and aren’t covered by Workman’s Comp, so they don’t count as being “employed.” Since they aren’t looking for work or collecting unemployment, they don’t count as “unemployed” either. Thanks to the War on Drugs, the marijuana industry has become a black hole that sucks people and money out of the economy and leaves a trail of poverty, addiction and death in it’s wake.

We don’t have prosperity here. We have organized crime. What’s the difference? In prosperity: people have jobs and homes and their kids get enough to eat and learn how to succeed in the world. In organized crime, people go missing and turn up dead, honest work is for suckers, and kids become addicted to drugs, and commit suicide. The difference is pretty stark really. The only way to avoid seeing the difference is to measure the cash flow exclusively. Even from that perspective, organized crime doesn’t really look like prosperity; organized crime just looks as attractive as prosperity to people who don’t care about anything but money.

Here, you could always make more money growing weed than you could make doing anything else, so growing marijuana became a “no brainer” for people around here. Consequently, we have a lot of “no brainer” type people who feel entitled to middle-class incomes and lifestyles, but have no education or skills outside of herb gardening. We’ve been overrun by dull, greedy people who believe that cannabis is the only thing of value. They don’t mind being one-trick-ponies, even if it is a kind of a dirty trick, but most of us have more potential than that.

It’s been about 10 years since Anna Hamilton first asked the question: “What’s After Pot?” The unanimous response from the community has been “More Pot!” Instead of beginning a movement to diversify our economy, people treated Anna’s wake-up call as the shot from a starting pistol that signaled the beginning of the greenrush. Everyone doubled-down on dope, but now the pressure is on.

Small growers get squeezed, and everyone’s profit margins shrink, as big players with deep pockets gamble for control of the legal cannabis market. As more states legalize cannabis, and bring industrial scale production online, the price of raw cannabis continues to drop. Downward pressure on the price of cannabis opens up more economic potential by multiplying the opportunities for value added cannabis products. The new openness of the legal market means that there’s a whole world of cannabis lifestyle products and service tie-ins to explore. However, lower prices for raw cannabis means that Humboldt County’s marijuana windfall will evaporate.

There’s plenty of economic potential here in SoHum for anyone with the imagination, ingenuity and drive to realize it. Unfortunately, 40 years of cannabis windfall has pretty much bred the imagination, ingenuity and drive out of us. Instead of facing reality and working together as a community to diversify and humanize our economy, we’re all busy milking the War on Drugs right to the last drop. The question is: What is the last drop for you? Is it $800 a pound? $500? $300? How low can you go, and still make money from weed in Humboldt County?

You can get more for your weed if you sell it retail, and work it into our tourism appeal, but then you have to be prepared for a whole bunch of unruly young people coming here to get high. We have that now, and it’s the thing people complain most about. If we want this area to remain famous for herb, and you still want to make a living from it, we’ll need to be more accommodating to pot smokers of all stripes, especially the young and unkempt.

To sell herb retail, in a legal market, Humboldt County needs to be as accommodating to unkempt hippies as fast food retailers are to obese people, or bartenders are to alcoholics. It comes with the territory. If the idea of graciously serving hippies with dogs and backpacks and making them feel at home seems repugnant to you, maybe you weren’t cut out for the marijuana industry after all. Around here, we don’t recognize our economic potential. Instead, we call the cops on it, beat it senseless on the town square, and convene town meetings on how to get rid of it.

 

If we suffer massive unemployment or economic hardship because of falling cannabis prices, it is only because the windfall from the War on Drugs blinded us to our true economic potential and robbed us of our moxie. If we succeed in this new legal environment, it will be because enough of us realized that we have other skills and talents that we never called on, because we always had marijuana. We may find that those skills and talents lead us in new directions and towards more satisfying lives. In that respect, falling marijuana prices just might be the best thing that ever happened to us.

More Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment From Estelle Fennell

A few weeks ago I attended the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors meeting to voice my opposition to Estelle Fennell’s latest proposal to criminalize Humboldt County’s impoverished underclass. She wanted County Council to explore the feasibility of imposing a countywide overnight parking ban. This is just Estelle’s latest cruel attempt to criminalize human need. First, she pushed through an ordinance to prohibit people from asking for help. Then she made it illegal to sleep outside. Now she wants to make it illegal to park overnight anywhere in the county.

Not that long ago, at Shop Smart in Redway, around 11pm, on our way home from somewhere, a woman stopped us to ask our advice. She had just driven all day with her six-year-old son to get to Redway. In the morning, she planned to attend an event at the Heartwood Institute. She’d been to Heartwood before, but it had been some time ago, and she didn’t feel confident about driving the remaining thirty miles or so of steep, narrow, twisted, poorly maintained, roads at night, in the rain. She asked us if we knew of a safe place she could park her mini-van overnight, so that she and her son could get a few hours of sleep before they drove the rest of the way in the morning.

We understood her situation completely. We’ve been to Heartwood, once. I wouldn’t try to drive those roads, at night, in the rain, if I could possibly avoid it. Hell, I wouldn’t try to drive to my place in the dark and rain if I didn’t know the way so well. I also wouldn’t drop thirty dollars on a campsite just so we could turn the engine off, climb in the back and get a few hours sleep before we drove the rest of the way in the morning. If we made $106,000+ a year, like Estelle Fennell, and had political motivation to patronize local businesses, we’d probably get a hotel room, but we survive because we don’t blow money on shit we don’t want or need, and we sure don’t need to be woken up and given a ticket.

We didn’t have a good answer for this poor woman and her son. We warned her that Locals on Patrol had a reputation for harassing people who try to sleep in their vehicles, and that a Sheriff’s Deputy or CHP officer might pay them a visit as well. We discussed the general lay of the land, and wished her luck. It was the best we could do for her.

At the Board of Supervisors meeting, Supervisor Fennell showed pictures of the terrible fire that burned the Presbyterian Church in Garberville about a month ago. A fire in an RV parked next to the church, spread, and burned a portion of the church before being extinguished by firefighters. Estelle complained that the RV had been parked there for an extended period of time, and proposed that if we just ban overnight parking all over the county, we can prevent fires in campers from spreading to churches in the future.

Estelle also reminded us of one of her first ordinances that made life harder for people in Southern Humboldt, the one that banned overnight parking on the Sprowell Creek Rd. Overpass Bridge. That overpass was an ideal location for people who needed to get off the road for a little shut-eye. It has easy access to the highway, and all of the gas stations in Garberville, but it’s quiet, has very little traffic, and minimal impact on residential neighborhoods. Almost all of the RVs in town used to park there. If Estelle Fennell hadn’t pressed for that overnight parking ban on the Sprowell Creek Overpass Bridge years ago, the camper that caught fire probably would have been safely parked on that bridge, far from any structures. The Presbyterian Church would still be intact, and firefighters would have had a much easier fire to fight.

Further, the fire that started in the camper may well have been an act of arson. We have had a rash of such attacks recently. Arsonists in SoHum have torched numerous vehicles, including many campers and Rvs, on county roads in the last several years. You can still see the remains of a recently torched RV on Briceland Rd west of Redway. In February of 2015 Ron Machado and his belongings were set on fire in broad daylight in downtown Garberville. Additionally, Weston Coen, Joe Turner, and James Wallace, among others were all severely beaten on the streets of Garberville, in a wave of violence against the poor and homeless, and no one has been held accountable in any of these crimes. If Supervisor Fennell had done anything at all about the wave of vigilante violence and arson in Southern Humboldt, not only could she have saved lives, she might have saved the Garberville Presbyterian Church too.

Not only that, but if Estelle Fennell, and the rest of our Board of Supervisors had just listened to the Humboldt County Human Rights Commission, last Summer, when the Human Right Commission advised the Board of Supervisors to declare a shelter crisis in Humboldt County, most of the violence we’ve seen in Southern Humboldt, recently, could have been prevented. The HRC looked extensively at the facts on the ground, and determined that Humboldt County faces a real shelter crisis, and advised the Board of Supervisors to declare it.

Declaring a shelter crisis would make some public land available for camping and emergency housing, and relax certain housing regulations to make more structures available for habitation. Declaring a shelter crisis could have relieved a lot of pressure on downtown Garberville, and prevented numerous assaults on homeless people. Declaring a shelter crisis could have gotten all of the campers off of Garberville’s residential side streets, and onto a designated lot, preventing the fire at the Presbyterian Church, and declaring a shelter crisis would have saved people’s lives. Instead, because the Board of Supervisors ignored the recommendations of the Human Rights Commission, several people are dead, others were violently assaulted, many more lost their homes, and the Garberville Presbyterian Church burned.

Time was, the Federal prohibition on marijuana was the only law you needed to bust poor people, and push them around. Now that marijuana is legal, Estelle Fennell has risen to the occasion with a whole slew of new laws designed to keep cops busy harassing people who are just trying to survive, instead of investigating real crimes, like the ones her supporters commit. The Humboldt County Board of Supervisors has a responsibility to protect and serve the inadequately housed residents of Humboldt County, as well as the well-housed, and we have enough stupid laws already, more than we have resources to enforce.

I remember when Estelle campaigned against her predecessor, Cliff Clendennon, who had just voted in favor of an unpopular resolution to prohibit camping around the courthouse, because of the “Occupy” protests going on there at the time. Estelle said that she didn’t think she would support a law that limited people’s rights that much. Instead, once elected, she passed laws that violate people’s rights all over the county. These draconian new ordinances Estelle and her colleagues have dreamed up are exactly the kinds of laws that the UN Commission on Human Rights in Geneva condemns the US for, calling them “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.” That’s what I call them too, and we’ve had more than enough of them from Second District Supervisor Estelle Fennell, already.

 

What’s the War on Drugs Got To Do With the Humboldt Brand

Right now, I see a lot of people scrambling frantically to find their niche in the legal marijuana market. In our eagerness to compete in this rapidly evolving market, we should be very careful not to overlook the infected wounds still festering in this county from the War on Drugs, nor should we miss the opportunity to take pride in our heritage, for our role in the marijuana underground, because that is the story of the Humboldt brand.

I realize that’s a lot to pack into one sentence, but we need to think about this. Even if a lot of Humboldt County cannabis farmers do well in the legal market, we still have a whole lot of people in Humboldt County who grew up in the black market, and have no other marketable skills or education. They have been traumatized by the War on Drugs, and a lot of them have developed problems with drugs and alcohol as a result. They are never going to become weed tycoons in the legal market, but they were born and raised here in Humboldt County. They grew up in the marijuana underground. They fought the War on Drugs, and they built the Humboldt brand. You can’t sweep them under the rug without sweeping the Humboldt brand away with them.

The County didn’t haul sacks of chicken shit up the side of a mountain in the rain; they did. The County doesn’t have a panic attack every time it hears a helicopter; they do. The County didn’t grow the best marijuana anyone anyone had ever tasted; they did. Humboldt County never got arrested for marijuana. Humboldt County never had a gun stuck in its face over marijuana, and Humboldt County was never denied a job, kicked out of school, or had a Workman’s Comp claim denied because it smoked marijuana; but they did.

Their sweat, their tears and the wounds they suffered in the War on Drugs, as well as the addictions they developed as a result of that pain, built the Humboldt brand. Unless we acknowledge that suffering, the Humboldt brand is worthless. On the other hand, the more we acknowledge that suffering, and treat the wounds we have suffered in the War on Drugs, as a community, the more we can celebrate the accomplishments of the marijuana underground, and the ingenuity and courage it took to fight the War on Drugs, and the more the Humboldt brand is genuinely worth. It seems paradoxical, but we can’t expect other people to respect us for what we do here, if we can’t even respect ourselves, our community, our environment, and our heritage.

We can’t hide the problems the War on Drugs has created in our community behind the money the War on Drugs brought to us. Instead of trying to hide the poverty and addiction we see around us, or beating it to death on the streets of Garberville and Redway, we need to recognize how much our community has suffered in the War on Drugs. We need to show the world what prohibition has done to us, because unless they see the damage that was done to us, they cannot appreciate the heroic effort it took to fight the War on Drugs. For the world to recognize the War on Drugs as a real war, the world has to see real casualties, and we’ve got them.

 

The more we focus on how the War on Drugs affects us, and take stock of what it cost, the easier it will be for people to understand who we are and identify with us. Most cannabis consumers don’t know what it is like to enjoy a six-figure, tax-free, income from a black market commodity, but they do know what it is like to be terrorized by cops. Millions of people all over the country have been busted for marijuana and had their lives turned upside-down by it. From that perspective, they understand what we’ve been through. They’re traumatized too. They know that Humboldt County was ground zero in the War on Drugs, and they’ve seen how the War on Drugs has affected themselves, their family, and friends. If we can respect and acknowledge our own truth, they will recognize it as our strength, and draw strength from it.

Marijuana culture survived, endured and ultimately prevailed, after more than 40 years of war, because marijuana culture is strong, and Humboldt County is at the heart of marijuana culture. Marijuana is medicine, and that is why Humboldt County should be a place of healing for the wounds of the War on Drugs. We were at the center of it; we are at the heart of it, and we need it the most. The more we look after the people among us who are suffering, and the more we pull together as a community, the more we demonstrate the strength of marijuana culture to the world around us, and the more attractive it becomes. By acknowledging the violence and trauma of the War on Drugs, and working to heal our own wounds as a community, we rebuild the strength of marijuana culture, and reestablish Humboldt County as its heart, legitimately and honestly. That’s how we build the Humboldt brand.

We can’t truthfully say that Humboldt grown weed is of higher quality than weed grown in a warehouse in Oakland, or anywhere else for that matter. These days, everybody’s weed is plenty strong, if you can just keep the pesticides out of it. As this industry professionalizes, quality becomes a baseline expectation. Brand loyalty will be built on other factors including price, taste, convenience, packaging, and a whole slew of psychological factors. Whether you smoke Marlboros or Winstons probably has more to do with how you feel about cowboys and race-cars than it does with any difference in quality. Similarly, successful cannabis marketing depends more on understanding cannabis users and their culture, than it does with producing higher quality marijuana.