How can psychiatry co-opt the psychedelic underground subculture, discard its radical anti-authoritarian message of rejecting a dehumanizing society, retake psychiatry’s lost power and authority, and make both drug companies and the ruling elite happy? To strip psychedelic use down to its chemicals is to de-radicalize its communal and anti-authoritarian roots.
I’m not from DC, but I live here. I’m now a part of this living, breathing being that is a city. This city. It helps me to think of cities that way, even ones that I don’t fully feel at home in – like a body. And I’m like a blood transfusion. I know this isn’t my city, my body, but it’s where my life flows now, and so I best flow with it. This body holds me – it is my literal and figurative structure. I am one of the millions of cells rushing through the veins of this place, and although I’m a relative newcomer, I can feel that this body is not well.
As a leftist, I’m used to despair. How many hours have I, like so many others with an ounce of humanity in them, sat alone in my room miserably reading about global warming, horror-struck at the scorching hellscape we’re leaving our descendants?
It’s now been twelve years since Hurricane Katrina smashed through the levees of New Orleans, completely inundating the Lower Ninth Ward and validating scientists’ dire warnings of climate change’s destructive effects on weather patterns. In the long years of government inaction that have followed, early warning signs have given way to a sinking realization that climate change is no longer a nightmare future scenario humanity needs to avoid – it’s a present-day reality that we need to adapt to.
As Vermonters we are perhaps the most weather conscious people in North America. We feel the winter winds through the drafts of old farm houses, smell the melting snow when collecting our sap buckets, hear the birds of summer while tending our farms and gardens, and see the beauty of fall written across the hills in oranges, reds, and yellows. Many of us still work with our hands, be it as loggers, farmers, carpenters, midwives, or crafts-people.
