This article is based on this Dutch article of Martijn Benders
The next page continues. Trauma— In a world where trauma is distributed like a swarm of wandering demons, we cannot escape it. So, I want to speak about my plan. It involves nothing less than the enrichment of our Dutch parks—not as mere decoration, but as truly fertile splendor: the cultivation of Khat trees, whose leaves, so full of mysterious life force, can be chewed. For the Khat tree is nothing short of a fountain of MDMA, the natural source that could help us heal trauma, like a secret alliance with the deepest roots of the earth.
But no, in our rigid homeland, the park had to contain only ‘ornament’—merely showy, useless, and without substance. No fruit trees, no nut trees that would liberate us from the daily slavery of the supermarket. The park as decorum, as a mirror of the empty, useless existence prescribed to us. Imagine—if we could refresh ourselves at the trees, if their shade and fruits could truly heal us, instead of the damned pill factories!
And there’s an even deeper poison. The antidepressants that so dreadfully numb the human soul, soaking the mind in a salty sauce of serotonin, so one behaves like an emotionless automaton, for whom no horror casts a shadow over the mind anymore. In earlier times, one could not escape the glow of one’s own guilt after behaving like a beast. But now—now one takes a pill, wallows in artificial happiness, and continues to torture, bomb, destroy, as if free from the moral laws that once balanced the world.
Isn’t this enough reason to ban those pills? The alarming flattening of the human experience, the destruction of feeling itself. And not to mention the havoc they wreak on the delicate fabric of our receptor system—but that, ah, that is a topic for another day when the trees finally return their wisdom to us.
Turn every park into a medicine cabinet, a living pharmacy where nature itself is the doctor, and the leaves its prescriptions. Let us realize that the earth heals us with its roots and branches, with its seeds and fruits, as no chemical pill ever will. For it is not the machines, but the trees that are connected to our fate, and in their shade, we might find the peace that modern times have taken from us.
The machine is an extension of our ego. The dark men from Heine’s poem Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen from 1844 are still among us. Heine wrote his satirical and sharp social critique in exile because the conservative German elites made his life so difficult that he felt forced to flee. He was also influenced by early socialism and supported revolutionary ideas, making him a suspect and unwanted figure for the ruling powers in Germany.
Even in 1844, that cathedral was already pitch black, without any smog to blame for it. If we should call anything a Catholic miracle, it would be that fact.
Martinus 14-10-2024