I had my first long summer bike ride along the beach yesterday. I rode some 35 miles total from downtown Ventura to Rincon Point along the beach, and back.
It was my favorite time of the day for such a bike ride: approaching sunset. The temperature was dropping as the dying sun reflected a rust color off the seaside cliffs. It was beautiful. This bike ride takes me two hours, and by the time I finish I am pleasantly exhausted and ravenously hungry. I refuel over dinner at a restaurant, with my bike on my car outside, and it is dark when I arrive home.
Being outdoors in the sun while sweating over an hour or two is almost the secret to feeling good in my mood and my body. It is a time-tested formula for me.
But a complaint.
There is a stretch of beach along the coast just north of Emma Wood State Park where locals drive to park while watching the waves crash into the shore. I refer to this area as “ganja alley,” because the area always reeks of marijuana. The mostly young people drive there to escape their households and smoke out or drink some beers with their buddies. The pungent smell of cannabis almost always floats over the area. I have to bike through it.
Yuck.
The smell reminds me a bit of a pair of 15-year olds surreptitiously smoking pot in some hidden corner of a local park or urban area where they hope nobody will stumble upon them. That is where inadvertently I used to come across the skunky smell of cannabis.
But now marijuana is “legal,” and I run into people smoking in public much more unabashedly. You are not supposed to smoke cannabis around other people outside your house, but people increasingly do it. Cannabis is so much more “in your face” than it used to be.
When the robust debates were occurring on whether we ought to legalize marijuana, I remember hearing some warn that the consumption of pot would increase vastly if it became legal. There are good reasons to make marijuana legal, but I suspect it really has increased the consumption of cannabis nationwide. Or maybe it just brought it out more into the open?
Well, if that is the case, I wish marijuana were back in private behind closed doors. Or hidden away in some niche in the park again.
On the night of Easter this year — April 4th, 2021 — I was walking around the Las Vegas Strip with my family. I wanted to show my daughters around. I wanted them to see the lights and flash of “Sin City.” I had not been there in some ten years, and my daughters had never seen the place. Since that time marijuana had become legal, and I walked through cloud after cloud of marijuana smoke. It was obnoxious. The Las Vegas Strip was a motley scene of tourists like us rubbernecking at it all, locals who hung out there often looking for excitement and entertainment, and a few falling apart crack whores and other ne’er-do-wells looking for action or whatever. There were many drinking alcohol in public, also, but it did not smell up the environs like the pot smokers did. It was a trashy scene. I will not again visit Las Vegas anytime soon. Maybe in ten more years I will try again.
In my high school classes I used to hold debates about whether we should make marijuana legal, and instead of strictly debating that question my students would almost instinctively move to either the marijuana or alcohol sides and face off. They were ready to fight. “Drinking alcohol makes you sloppy drunk and then hungover the next morning, unlike pot! It will pickle your liver and take you down! You reek of booze. Lousy lushes!” the potheads would tell the drinkers. “Smoking pot makes you stupid and lazy! Blazing away while laying around like zombies watching YouTube videos and eating frozen pizzas to quell the munchies. Burnout stoners!” replied the drinkers to the potheads. I always tried to interject that alcohol and cannabis, being different chemicals which affect the body differently, might both be bad for you when consumed to excess and/or too often. That level of nuance did not get much traction in the angry debate.
Alcohol is bad enough, but Prohibition taught us the folly of trying to ban it in the early 20th century. Maybe marijuana had arrived at the same level of cultural acceptance as alcohol by the early 21st century? Maybe it was time to make cannabis legal, too? But an America where you plunge through waves of marijuana smoke whenever you are in public places is not one where I want to live. I have never smoked pot before, a fact others have had trouble believing. I do not claim any moral superiority in this regard. It is just that I grew up with a mother who smoked cigarettes and finally died from them, and so I reacted against any form of smoking. Cigarette and marijuana smoke evince the same level of olfactory distress with me.
On April 4, 2021 I spent the evening walking all over the Las Vegas Strip while people watching. There were thousands in the crowded streets, casinos, stores, and the byways in between. The scene was very diverse, with young people in the majority. I was surprised at how many African-Americans there were hanging out on the Strip. I did some research and saw how some 20% of North Las Vegas was of that demographic. The rowdy Raiders football team had moved from Oakland to Las Vegas, and we drove by their shiny new football stadium off the 15 Freeway. And a Google search informed me that there was a lot of violent crime on the Las Vegas Strip, much of it supposedly imported by visitors and transplants from Southern California where I am from. I believe it!
What I saw on the Strip on Easter Sunday troubled me. Two months later I am still troubled. Waves of marijuana smoke and drinking on the sidewalks. Tattoos on all sorts of body parts. Trashy trashy trashy. These are the Americans which will power the United States of America into the future?* Marijuana dispensaries and tattoo parlors dot the landscape.
You might reply, “You were in Las Vegas! What did you expect?” You would of course be correct.
But if this vision of the United States at a certain demographic moment — the Millennial generation coming into their own — are to be the ones to compete with mainland China culturally, technologically, and militarily… well, I would bet on the Chinese. Too many Americans are too busy lying around like zombies high on cannabis to have much fire in the belly. This is one face of America — land of the fat, the superficial, and the stoned. TikTok and YouTube “viral videos” and Instagram “influencers.”
Maybe I am just an aging guy decrying the decline in the younger generation, just as so many have done since Socrates was accused of corrupting the young on down through history. Perhaps this is all a “get off my lawn!” moment from a homeowner to the kids in the neighborhood.
Like there weren’t plenty of fat, superficial, and stoned Americans around when you were younger, Richard?
Probably there were.
I don’t know.
But I do know that on April 5, 2021 I left Las Vegas and drove with my family to Saint George, Utah. A quick Google search showed me that some 68% of the local population was Mormon. The scene was very much less diverse, with lots of young Mormon dads with short haircuts and several children per family in the pool at my hotel. Saint George, Utah could hardly have been more different than Las Vegas, Nevada. I could see this almost at first glance.
I remember learning back in college long ago that Nevada was the state with the worst public health statistics in the country, while neighboring Utah had the best. In short, Team Las Vegas was less healthy than Team Mormon. Not exactly a surprise there. The Mormons are big believers in community and don’t smoke or drink. Las Vegas tends to be the opposite. The name “Sin City” is not unearned. A quick Google search informs me that tattoos are “strongly discouraged” by the LDS Church.
My intellect reminds me that in large populations you will find the healthy and the virtuous everywhere — as well as its opposite. You will find potheads and drunks in Utah, and healthy family-types in Las Vegas. To generalize is to be inexact. The world is a complex place which resists characterization. Saint George and Las Vegas are complicated places in this world.
But I know which place I would rather live in, if I had to choose between these two extremes. And I know which America I would prefer to share.
The one with fewer tattoos on the body parts of the young, and less billowing clouds of marijuana smoke in the public spaces. Less Bernie Sanders and more Mitt Romney.
Ymmv.
But “the world is broad and wide,” as Shakespeare reminds us. And for some time I have been looking around for a place to retire eventually; maybe this is why I scrutinize so closely places I don’t know well like Utah or Nevada. Or Arizona or Idaho. Maybe Texas or Florida?
I can choose to retire wherever I want, after all.
So where to go?
That is the question.
Or maybe stay put where I am?
The answer is as of yet unknown.
But I’m processing it all.
Lots to process.
We shall see.
When the time arrives, I will know what to do.
At least I hope I will.
There will be choices available.
* Upon further reflection, I recognize that the lumpenproletariat hanging out on the Las Vegas Strip will not be the ones running America. It are the rich people inside the luxury casinos of Las Vegas who eat in the expensive restaurants and gamble and watch the shows there without ever emerging down onto the sidewalks outside who run America (along with those who actually own the casinos).
