A Nation Of Stoners

Americans are bored. In fact (if it is a fact), we are bored for 131 days a year, which is 36 percent of the calendar. This is according to a survey of 2,000 adults, sponsored by Bowlero Bowling Alleys.

The survey defines a boring day as a day in which no “fun” occurs. The primary causes of such a day, according to the adults surveyed, seem to be work and parenting: these “suck the fun out of life.” Sixty percent complain that “life is just too grown-up.” And movies cost too much. They miss the fun they had as children—birthday parties, sleepovers, and just hanging out with friends. For some reason it doesn’t occur to them that they could still have birthday parties, sleepovers, and friends—if they wanted them. I mean, how hard can it be to ask a couple of people over to watch “Attack of the Crab Monsters” late at night, and then sleep on the couch, air mattresses, or whatever? Who says they can’t do that?

The survey also gives us the math by which they reached the figure of 131 days a year, but that’s too boring to repeat here.

To be sure, there’s a lot of scope for boredom nowadays. There is the flat, drab, monotonous landscape of “diversity”—everyone’s an aggrieved minority, everything is racist, everybody has to have exactly the same stupid left-wing opinion as everybody else, like the same things, hate the same things—oh, wow, that’s boring!

But the real problem is that too many of us get spoon-fed everything from day care right through college, which is a kind of day care, only more expensive… and suddenly you’re done with college and the spoon mysteriously disappears. No one’s around anymore to organize your sports, arrange your play dates, tell you what to read, what to watch on TV, and tell you what you think, sparing you the effort of thinking for yourself. Suddenly we are thrown back upon our own puny resources which have been so badly bonsai’ed by our popular culture and our so-called education system. What to do for fun? We don’t know!

But never let it be said that our ruling class is not up to the challenge of, well, ruling us.

Recently the New Jersey legislature voted down a bill to legalize recreational marijuana, despite our Far Left Crazy governor’s frantic efforts to define it as the civil rights issue of our time. Now they doubt they can ever get the bill passed, so they’re moving on to Plan B: put it up for referendum. The people will vote to get high. No way it can miss.

Setting the stage for this, the New Jersey nooze media are all on board the cannabis express, “cannabis” sounding so much more Scientific than “pot.” I saw a nooze story today which claimed that cannabis will “help you with your workouts.” It will even “help you with your meditations”—although what kind of meditation any pot-head might have is probably better not imagined. Mostly they just sit around and act stoned. Unless they’re driving stoned. And the airwaves are full of commercials and public disservice announcements lauding “cannabis” as the answer to life’s problems—a genuine panacea, with absolutely no down side.

These are people who ought to know better—highly “educated” (oh, boy!), highly paid, supposedly responsible media and political bigwigs—practically knocking themselves out to get the rest of us habituated to marijuana. Why? Why do they want us stoned?

I’ve found the company of pot-heads excruciatingly dull; but I wonder if this is what our ruling class has come up with as the cure for a national epidemic of tedium. Can you be bored and stoned at the same time? When you’re wasted on pot, does Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders start making sense to you? Or do you just not care, you’re high, none of that grown-up stuff matters—at least not for the time being. Everything just makes you giggle.

Is this the electorate they want? Is this what the top-down push for pot is all about?

A nation of stoners. If liberals want it, it can only be bad for us.

I have discussed these and other topics throughout the week on my blog, http://leeduigon.com/. Stop in for a visit; a single click will take you there. You can also find my articles at http://www.chalcedon.edu/.

E-Mail Lee Duigon: leeduigon@verizon.net