– posted by thehim
So, like everyone else, I haven’t had much time to post here, but now that I’m in my second week of unemployment, that excuse is getting lamer by the hour. Anyway, I still know how to fill my calendar even without a day job, so I was down at the Walmart in Covington this afternoon collecting signatures for I-1149, this year’s attempt by Sensible Washington to get marijuana legalization on the ballot.
At around 2:30, these two older guys came up to the entrance, saw my sign, and the one guy just says, “anything with marijuana is a no” and walked into the store. I figured it would be entertaining when he came back out of the store, and I was not disappointed. When he came back out, he started talking to me about how you “pull it out by the root”. I asked him how you do that with a market that supplies 30 million American customers. He says – and I’m not making this up – “with a 357″. And he pretended to shoot my sign with his finger as a gun. Looking back, I should have clarified whether his strategy involved shooting people, plants, or just signs, but I missed my opportunity to crawl into this man’s noggin and really get lost.
Sensing that I didn’t buy their theory that a 357 could end marijuana use in the United States, the second man then asked me why there have never been any wars fought on U.S. soil. I reminded him of both the Civil War and the War of 1812, to which he clarified “a war where foreigners invaded us”, to which I once again mentioned the War of 1812. In return, I got a look that was part confusion, part exasperation.
For a closing act, the second man then said something about how important it was that we have rights, and then a second later threatened to go to the store manager to have me removed (Walmart – to its credit – is very good about allowing people to gather signatures in front of their stores). It turns out he knows as much about our rights as he knows about the War of 1812.