Illinois politicians celebrate legal recreational marijuana

This is it: The point at which centrality and national character is arrived at--this oddly (for a disparate country) arbitrative, focal megalopolis (Chicago), decides whatever is American-to-the-core: The "hog butcher to the world" ordains (it's partly metaphysical, partly actual) that legal cannabis is essential to American Existence. Well--all right and so be it--but how was this thing decided? There's something about the inherently corrupt politics of the half beautiful and half ugly city that appalls me...and (somehow, hysterically) amuses me. I'm recognizing family here, but family that embarrasses the hell out of me, and that I had maybe too comfortably forgotten about.

The reason for which is, basically, geography; roots. My Roots, so to say, predisposing me to a certain dismissive moral laziness, are in a particular, western corner of topsoil in southeastern Washington (State) that did not get washed away by the many Missoula Floods of up to 15,000 years ago--the Palouse. Which, for a rather small geographical location, has vast vistas of rolling grassland, now planted mostly to wheat, of anciently wind-blown loess. Good country for the use that the local Native Americans, the Nez Perce, put it to, of raising horses--specifically the elegant and intelligent, child-friendly "Appaloosa" horse. The things we native Palouseans don't believe in are legion; and we are a good part of the basic reason for Washington (State)'s having the largest number of atheists, per capita, of any state in the union, followed (by a percent or two) by the godless populace of Oregon.

Anyway, IMO, the reason for the perhaps lazy, unbelieving character of us Northwesterners has to do--not with any Quarrel with God, such as primitives suppose--but rather with the utter benignity of our land and climate. We don't fear God, at all, in any sense, because we are not threatened, nor even seriously discommoded, by anything in our environment. The horrors of humidity wafted out of the Gulf of Mexico and terrors of hurricanes and tornadoes are not even thought of among us.  Our winters are mild, and our summers sheer "Mediterranean" delight. The thing that occurred to me, indifferently, as a representative child of the Pacific Northwest, for example, when I came to learn of it, about the Stoning of Stephen, and Saul/Paul's bad conscience on account of it, was: how unnecessary. Pretty much, in philosophical and ethical terms, what I felt socially and musically at my initial exposure to 'Pagliacci.' Jesus. ¿Don't these people have lives?