We live in a world where you can order news and information that meets your own ideological beliefs. Liberal Progressives, like me, can find outlets that are heavily slanted to our ways of thinking. Conservative thinkers can find outlets that serve their needs. Even in the weed movement, we are very guilty of only talking about news, current events, and positions that serve our own purpose.
The problem with insulating ourselves in this manner is that we fail to see the entire picture, and often, we are ill-prepared for the ongoing debate because we are not able to understand both sides of the argument. In order to win the war, it will be necessary for us to begin to know our enemy as well as we know ourselves. Sun Tsu’s art of War summed it up like this:
It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.
The cannabis industry is stuck in the “win one- lose one” scenario, where we do not know our enemies very well, but we sure as hell know ourselves. Our situation is overwhelmed by tunnel vision mentality that fails to recognize the strength and strategies of our opposition. We underestimate their message, and allow our own pie-in-the-sky beliefs rule our day. We continue to preach to our own choir with messages of victory and accomplishment, when the reality is anything but. We have fallen victim to being convinced and swayed by our own rhetoric.
That is a dangerous position. We have drank our own kool-aid, and in-turn, we continue to miss opportunities to make real progress.
If we fail to really understand the position of our enemy then how do we ever expect to defeat it? Our opposition has been extremely effective in misleading the world that cannabis is dangerous, and that weedheads are criminals. Yet, we are so enamored by our righteous postion that we do not truly get where we are, and/or how the hell we got here. The movement loves to sing its own praises for the smallest victories, yet it rarely acknowledges its own clear and devastating defeats. It is like we choose to pretend that our own failures have nothing to do with the problem; and then we wonder why we lose the ground we have gained.
We are constantly defending our position against bizarro attacks because we fail to even see them coming. Our inability to recognize the clear and present threats, and to disarm volatile situations before they manifest into major issues, have left us at a severe disadvantage. Because we fail to confront many of the issues within our own movement until they are beyond problematic, we find ourselves playing from behind most of the time. Our movement is terrible at looking at itself through the eyes of the society we live in. The blind followers of the cannabis rhetoric wear nothing but rose colored glasses. The world is a figment of their imagined reality.
This is no position to take on a battle of this proportion from. In order to end cannabis prohibition once and for all, we will need to begin to understand the opposition more clearly, and to develop more sound strategies to combat their entrenched positions. We will need to learn to better consolidate our resources, or message, and our human experiences into a more focused force that works to accomplish the sole goal of defeating our enemy.
Weedheads are generally passive in our approach. We have allowed for our enemies to take advantage of our kindness, and to exploit our rational ways of thinking for their own gain.
It is time that we moved out of the church and away from our own choir. We must take our message of freedom and justice to the masses, and begin to combat these enemies face to face. We must grasp the position of our enemy, and begin to confront them in a more pro-active manner. The time for trying to be nice and kind has passed. If this battle for cannabis freedom is to be won, we must begin to move our troops behind enemy lines. We have got to quit listening to our own rhetoric and stop being lulled to sleep by our own hyperbolic crap.
We CAN win this thing, and relatively soon. But we must stop bullshitting ourselves. We have got to quit buying into our own bullshit, and begin to effectively attack our enemies position. If we can do that, victory will be easy. If we continue to march around the playground declaring ourselves king of the kickball court when everyone else is playing tether ball, do not be surprised if we are still fighting this fight for several more decades.