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Deliverance
One might think the Eastern philosophies would view puttering with high
regard. After all, puttering has a fluidity that transcends its lack of
order, and it has a very loose relationship with planning and
schedules. I had a friend in college that was always saying, "Stay
fluid." This seemed to mean that you should never lock yourself into
any singular plan or thought. To stay fluid, meant that you were always
prepared to change your plan, not that you actually had a plan, but,
that as needed, you could change horses in the middle of any stream you
happened to be drifting in at the time. During the late 1960s and early
70s this "stay fluid" capability was a valuable asset, in that, we were
always on the edge of one insanity or another, and to lock in on any
one space we found ourselves would have been suicidal.
Somebody once
said, "You can always tell how involved someone was with the 1960s by
how little they remember about it." There is probably some truth in
that statement, but as time passes and long term memory takes over from
the short term, most of us that lived the life of the 60s seem to be
recalling at least the highlights. As I look back on many of the
experiences from those days, it is with a bit of trepidation. We did so
many things that should have killed us that it is hard to figure how
any of us made it out alive. Some did not.
John was one of
those that never made it to the next stage. John and I had a standing
date every Wednesday afternoon for most of a year in college. What took
place on this so called date was, we would take a large dose of LSD and
play chess for the rest of the afternoon. For the two of us, afternoon
classes were canceled, and these chemical mixtures of color and time
took us to a different school every Wednesday. The order of the game
itself may have been the only thing that kept us from blowing off this
world entirely. John had a propensity for water even though he couldn't
swim a lick, and when he was high on one of the many elicit drugs we
made a way of life in those days, he would nearly always have to be
saved from his own ambitions to become one with water. I have had to
drag him from the Spokane River on two occasions, and know of several
more instances where others have done the same.
One Sunday
afternoon four or five of us were having a picnic on Hangman Creek
several hundred yards above its confluence with the Spokane River. We
had all dropped acid as well as polished off a couple of bottles of
some cheap wine and eaten far too much potato salad, when John
announced he was going for a walk. We told him to stay away from the
river and he agreed. When he headed off, not in the direction of the
river, we all felt comfortable he would be fine. We never saw him
again. We never knew for sure what happened, but none of us really
doubted that he ended up in the river as he had so many times before,
but this time none of us were there to pull him back out. Since none of
us saw him go into the water and his body was never found, we always
liked to think that he had finally made it to the big city to play key
boards with Frank Zappa.
Not everything
was wonderful from that time, but when I think of it all at once, it
usually comes out with a positive warm glow to it. There was a short
window of time where most of us really did believe in the possibility
of spreading the feeling of universal love amongst the masses. We even
thought love could stop the war in Viet Nam. Maybe we were right, and
our love was just too weak to do the job, but as I look back to those
young naive days of the late 60s, I still think we saw something real.
Something that should not have been set aside, for most of us to return
to the economic based culture from where we had come. This whole
generation of "baby boomers" has very little real perseverance. I think
most of us had things a bit too easy. We never had to work hard and
wait long for very little or even less. Growing up in the 50s was soft
and plentiful for most of our generation, and we got more of what we
wanted than what we needed. In the 50s and 60s anything could happen,
the country was on an economic roll, nearly everyone was making money
and there was no end in sight. As youths of this time, we were free to
meander through our self indulgent lives with little thought of how we
had gotten there or what kept us in our virtual reality. Very few
realized how the past neglects of the environment were about to catch
up with us, and we just coasted along as if we were on an endless
picnic.
About that time
the French pulled out of Viet Nam, leaving a vacuum that seemed to suck
our generation out of the periphery, and sent us either off to war or
out into the streets in protest of everything that had come before us.
In a few short years, a generation that had, just moments before, been
playing Bobby Darin and Leslie Gore records were now listening to Bobby
Dylan and The Jefferson Airplane. These same kids, who's mothers had
warned not to drink too much at the Saturday night "frat party" were
now ingesting LSD and sitting around in circles smoking sweet smelling
herbs. Our parents, who were then in charge of the world, had little
understanding or tolerance with our departure from the status-quo that
had brought the planet to where it was, and we, the generation of
pampered idealists, pulled hard at the bonds that tied us to our past.
Our parents, the
generation that were adults, or nearly so, during the Second World War,
were proud of where they had brought the world. They had just beaten
the hell out of Hitler and his Third Reich along with Imperial Japan,
freeing the world from these chains of evil, and the job of
neutralizing communism was well on its way to creating unprecedented
profits here at home. The war had devastated the infrastructure of much
of the industrialized world, but American structures were only
strengthened, and with this head start the U.S. shot out to an early
lead in the race for personal comfort and eventual decadence.
Our parents
thought they had cut a fat hog, they had worked hard and truly
sacrificed, they could see the end of the rainbow and it appeared to
have the proverbial pot of gold. We, the spoiled whippersnappers of the
60s cared less about the pot of gold and more about pot itself.
Marijuana was a drug that had been around long before Moses led anyone
out of anywhere, but it had received far less attention as a drug, than
for many of the other uses that came from this same plant. The hemp
plant has been used extensively for centuries, world wide, as a source
of fiber for rope, and clothes, and paper. The Declaration of
Independence is written on paper made from hemp fiber.
These fibers
have woven the fabric of many a culture, and only in our modern times
have they become a problem. Every civilization of mankind has taken
unto itself one or more of the many mind-altering drugs that lie
waiting for us around the edges of our lives. In America, soon after
the lifting of prohibition, the economic forces of the alcohol industry
pressured congress to make marijuana illegal. Marijuana had never
competed much with alcohol, and even during the decades of prohibition
it took a definite back seat to those fermented spirits that kept the
country in legal and social turmoil. Lobbyists for the booze industry
felt falsely threatened, and worked diligently to remove any
possibility of future competition from this benign plant. Those laws
against Marijuana paved the way to the decline and end of the valuable
hemp fiber industry in this country. These same laws had very little
effect on the use of marijuana, few people used the drug before, and
few used it after the passing of these laws. It wasn't until the mid
60s, when the youth of this country adopted marijuana as their drug of
choice, that it found any appreciable popularity. Those laws, passed in
the late 30s, served only to make it more enticing for much of a
generation dedicated to combating and confusing the established order.
This "baby
boomer" generation seems still to combat the established order, but now
that order is pretty much their own. They seem to be at odds with
themselves, as they struggle to sort out the useful ideas from their
own and preceding generations, and as always, those self appointed
guardians of personal profit have risen to the top. Decisions, large
and small, are made with economics as the number one, if not the only,
criteria in the process. Even more than the generations before us, we
have chosen to ignore non-economic reasons for our actions. The general
morality of society appears to be sliding away before our very eyes. It
is not that we are suffering so much from immorality, but we have seen
a gradual tendency toward amorality in our entire culture. There was a
time when honesty and truth were held as basic unalterable virtues, but
they have become relative to their own context, and only apply if they
fit our personal needs. It has not only become okay to cheat the
government, or large corporations, but it is okay to cheat anyone, and
it has become a righteous obligation to take as much as we can for
ourselves from every source available.
Fair play has
become a thing of the past. Finding the truth has given way to finding
the solution that serves one's self. Our legal system provides a good
example of this lack of interest in real truth. Neither lawyers nor
prosecutors care one iota for the truth in the cases in which they are
involved, but only whether or not they win the case. This relationship
with the truth has permeated all facets of our society. It has worked
its way into the very fabric of human life, and truth and fairness have
become the exception instead of the rule. Right and wrong are now
determined by whether or not we can get away with something. The golden
rule has become a sad joke, and nobody's laughing.
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