Total Prohibition Now

As long as some is still available for medicinal purposes.

I can’t remember the source, but I do remember reading that Heber J. Grant counseled the citizens of Utah to vote against repealing prohibition saying that if they didn’t they would bring misery and destruction upon themselves and their posterity. No one believed the prophet!

For five years, 2004-2009, I lived in the only dry town in Maryland. Damascus was an agricultural town only 30 miles north of the Washington Monument, but more oriented in history and outlook towards the Pennsylvania Dutch. It is still full of small pastures and fields around town and larger ones further out, but agricultural is so efficient these days that I didn’t know anyone who worked those fields. My house was next to and above a 10-acre plot, and I would come home see that it had been planted, or the soy or wheat or corn harvested, or the chaff cleared. The population there grows decade by decade with more residential construction for people like me who work closer to DC. The county’s cops are particularly fond of the place, and every street has one or two police cars parked in driveways.

The town voted to go dry in 1933, and voted to keep it that way in 1976, 1984, 1992, and 1996. There is a liquor store along each of the three roads out of town. In 2012, a couple restaurant owners pushed for another vote, and 70% of the 11,000 who voted chose to end the town’s prohibition on liquor sales. It wasn’t allowed for there to still be just one place that wasn’t like everywhere else.

I mean, I live in lovely Deseret. I keep wondering why, exactly, we want to attract the kind of people that need booze to function in society. If they don’t like our laws and our culture, then why do they keep coming here? (I’m looking at you, Californians and New Yorkers. You keep moving here and wanting to make Utah into a Little California, and the locals would like you to stop. (I have Feelings about this subject.))

That being said, our neighbors are Mexican, and while the wife’s a member, the husband enjoys the occasional maudlin drunken chorus after a good party – and they love their parties. He yowls until the wee hours, which we find more amusing than anything. But let’s be honest: he’d find alcohol whether or not there was a prohibition. Illegality never stopped him from coming to the States, after all.

“Heber J. Grant counseled the citizens of Utah to vote against repealing prohibition”

There was a vote on it?

@johnsonj: there was an election/vote to choose delegates to the state constitutional convention for the purpose of ratifying or rejecting the 21st amendment. I assume the delegates then had their own vote.
https://www.archives.utah.gov/digital/6300.htm

I grew up in a dry county in Texas. This can be done.

Sutton, what year did that county _go_ dry? Was it back when the US was a predominantly Christian nation?

I think _going_ dry in this wicked day is a different thing than back then.

Not only is Utah not dry, its state law actually makes it illegal for any county or municipality to declare itself dry. In Arkansas, on the other hand, nearly half the counties are dry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dry_communities_by_U.S._state

How many years until smoking marijuana is declared a constitutional right? I’ll say seven. There was, for example, an article in the Washington Post about the injustice that marijuana use in public housing is prohibited, thereby denying residents of public housing the freedom to use marijuana in their homes the way residents of other housing can. It’s as if private worship were proscribed.

That last sentence hits

“No one will take this seriously and nothing will happen, naturally. But that is exactly the problem. We don’t have the will to be a people. Total prohibition isn’t something that inherently needs to happen itself, but it is what having a real identity would look like.”

I can agree with all that, even the last part.

The key or central point is our will to be a people. (Insert my sociality rant here.)

But what kind of people? Who’s people?

There needs to be some kind of transformative renewal or quickening or awakening in every single ward and branch. It can/could/might be inspired/instigated by leadership from above the ward/branch level, but to spread horizontally, it needs to catch some individual ward members on fire first. It cannot be sustained solely in a superior-to-subordinate manner of transmission. It has to (also) be organic, viral, and peer-to-peer.

It is not going to be (it can’t be) another “program” that people could robotically follow.

IMO, the vast majority of active/participating members in the US are actually asleep. Individually, we need to catch ourselves on fire, then catch our peers on fire.

In other words, it’s not just our sociality and culture that are off kilter, it’s the sum of all our individual attitudes and outlooks.

_If_ it’s a case of “the tyranny of small decisions” then the vast majority of us are making incorrect small decisions.

Preach, brother

I am increasingly liable to think that the primary purpose of the Word of Wisdom was this, and not health primarily.

@Zen, I’ve gone back and forth on the higher purposes of the WoW too. But when I hit 50 and started to see the 60-somethings in my social circles start to die off, and seeing that the smokers and drinkers started dieing off first, it seems like regular alcohol and tobacco use take at least 10 years off a person. And they can take away quality-of-life for a decade or so too, with things like COPD.

I also suspect there’s some tie-in between caffeine and diabetes. Caffeine messes with blood glucose levels, and that affects extra wear-and-tear on the pancreas, and affects overall glucose tolerance.

So I’m going to “embrace the power of ‘and.'” 🙂

–

Further developing the line of thought of WoW as a unifying principle…. Have we done to it what ancient Israel did to circumcision and other outward ordinances, focusing so much on the outward that we forgot the inward?

WoW, like circumcision, was (at least partly) to be a sign of some thing, not the thing itself. (And… even circumcision had/has some health benefits.)

To analogize a NT reference, are we WordofWisdoming our hearts?