Finneran: Nonnie’s Lament

Friday, April 05, 2019

Tom Finneran, GoLocalWorcester MINDSETTER™

Tom Finneran

Nonnie is older now, and, by her own account, she’s wiser too.

She grew up in the ‘60s and ‘70s in an old-school Italian family and she readily admits to smoking weed in her day. Of course her parents never knew about weed because to be old-school back then was to be oblivious to everything except the hippie glasses, the bell bottoms, the long hair, and the crazy music. Heaven forbid, but her parents had never even heard of marijuana.

Nonnie was not a habitual daily user, but she could roll a pretty good joint fairly quickly and she was familiar with the bong.

She’s worried today, not so much about her kids for, according to her, her sons are sensible with very sensible wives. Rather, her worry today is about her grandchildren and the world they inhabit.

She thinks the world has gone mad.

She’s adamant about allowing physicians to prescribe marijuana for medicinal purposes. She has seen first hand the ravages of radiation and chemo, of severe chronic pain, and of appetite suppression. She accepts the general sense that marijuana can help as a palliative to those brutal realities.

Rather, her gripe today is about the all too casual acceptance of “recreational marijuana” and the underlying greed behind it. She talks about the implications of a semi-stoned nation. She talks about the clever but deliberately misleading use of the word “recreational”. She too is old-school, and she views recreation as something healthy---walking, running, hiking, swimming, tennis, golf. She sees nothing healthy about being stoned.

She points out that America’s problems are not likely to be solved when all the social signals encourage large percentages of the population to get high and stay high. And, as a mother and grandmother, she knows enough about brain development to be appalled by the hucksters’ mad pursuit of money at the expense of the nation’s youth. Child development specialists might disagree with her, but she’s convinced that brain development continues for thirty years or more.

She also knows that her generation’s primary vice was sneaking beers and making fools of themselves on a six-pack or two. In her mind, that’s a far different form of juvenile stupidity than blowing weed and affecting brain cells.

It turns out that Nonnie has friends in Colorado who were very open to the full legalization of weed when that issue was being decided out there. You know the arguments---let adults choose to “recreate” in their own way and just think of all that extra tax revenue. Her friends now greatly rue the day that Colorado embraced weed. An explosion in homelessness, aggressive panhandling, public defecation, and street crime have become the norm in her friends’ hometown. Similar stories arise in Seattle and San Francisco, two once-great cities lurching toward tourist avoidance and taxpayer rebellion.

I remind Nonnie that this issue went to the ballot in Massachusetts and that “the people have spoken”. Nonnie rolls her eyes, eyes with which she has measured the world. She tells me with Churchillian certitude that the people are fools. She says that America is not Amsterdam, nor should it want to be.

I have nothing to say to this wise and worried woman. Her grandchildren are her pride and joy and she cringes for the world we are giving them.

I call it Nonnie’s lament. She calls it America’s wrong turn.

Tom Finneran is the former Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, served as the head the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council, and was a longstanding radio voice in Boston radio

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Finneran: Nonnie’s Lament

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