Green Crosses

If, as the ruling power, you need to send statements with public and humiliating executions, beheading is a popular method. But, if you'd like the recipients to suffer for longer, in a public setting, then nailing their hands up and their feet down so they suffocate slowly over the course of a few days would work. Except that you can't nail them to walls, so you'd need to build some sort of apparatus for that.

This post will end happier than this gruesome beginning. And nailing someone to an apparatus so they die slowly in a public fashion is definitely gruesome. It always seemed strange to me that the current ruling religious regime uses the killing apparatus for public executions as a central symbol for the religion.

But that symbol of the apparatus, the cross, worked its way into many places, with one example being flags. Working itself in directly would be in the Danish flag, and the other Scandinavian versions, and indirectly with England, Georgia, and Greece. Similar to the Greek cross, the near plus-sign, the Swiss flag has a white plus-sign on a red square. Because of the historic neutrality of the Swiss and their work providing medical support to both sides of warring entities, that image, sometimes shorthanded to the red plus-sign, is still used for medical deployments and humanitarian purposes.

In many foreign countries the red plus-sign coupled with an arrow will point you in the direction of the nearest hospital.

Then I noticed one of these around the corner from our apartment:



Then I began to see them other places...




Then I realized that it's all about "compassionate care" out here in California, and that the green cross means dispensary, a medical marijuana dispensary. Then I noticed that are more of them than there are liquor stores, and I started to feel better about the world. In the backs of the LA Weekly and the OC Weekly, near the ads for "unlicensed masseuses" are ads for procuring a medial card. However easy that may be remains to be seen, but the easier it is for people to get, the less need there'll be for folks who can get the other (all noxious chemical) stuff as well.

Even Walgreens is getting into the mix: