A day late for Father’s Day, this article is a tribute to my father. Life has not been terribly fair to him, but he greets every challenge he has faced with equanimity and grace, and he is kind and generous to a fault. He taught me to think for myself, and then to fight for what I believe in, no matter what. I just hope I will be able to pass on a fraction of the wisdom to others that he has. He has always been, and remains today, my role model, my intellectual foil, and my inspiration. Take a bow, Dad. There are a lot of people — seemingly mostly embittered born-again conservatives, professional cynics, and disengaged academics — second guessing the 60s these days, on this the 40th anniversary of Sergeant Pepper and the Summer of Love. They would have us believe the era was one of illusory and untenable change, of the co-opting of humanism for economic gain, and of lazy uncommitted people jumping on a convenient ‘revolutionary’ bandwagon as an excuse to take drugs or start riots. I suppose this was to be expected. The collapse of that amazing social revolution left many of us depressed, disillusioned and angry. Some of those who missed out are, I suspect, a bit envious and all too willing to embrace the schadenfreude of the revolution’s demise. There is no small amount of guilt from those who, for selfish reasons, abandoned the lofty ideals of the day to make fortunes in real estate or finance or law — the slogan of the day was “If you’re not part of the solution you’re part of the problem”, and many of us, if we were to be honest, would have to admit that we have become part of the problem. Easiest, then, to associate those days with hopeless naÔvetÈ and write it all off as a bad trip. Not so fast.
The values that we espoused to take their place were: love, peace, justice, spirituality, social experimentation, an organic, communal lifestyle, and “power to the people”. This was not that long after the McCarthy anti-communist witch hunts in the US, and these ideals were extremely threatening to those who believed fiercely in law and order, in respect for the “establishment”, in obedience to authority, in the endless struggle of “good” against “evil”, and in the ethic of hard work. When Timothy Leary advised an entire generation to “turn on, tune in and drop out” this was seen by many as heretical, dangerous, even criminal. Very few bothered to understand what he really meant. Some of the things we strove, clumsily, to espouse and create — the peace movement, the search for true justice, self-change and spirituality, egalitarianism, and living healthy, natural lifestyles — are enjoying something of a subtle, pragmatic resurgence, and have been since the 1990s. It is a motley crew advocating these things, a mix of 1960s diehards who have held onto our idealism, and two or three new generations who seek similar things but are doing so their own way, with their own cohort, using a somewhat different language to describe it: Communes are now Intentional Communities, “finding yourself’ is now self-actualization or self-improvement, and Power to the People is now equal opportunity, equity and heeding the Wisdom of Crowds. I think it is a bit sad, and illustrative of the degree of fragmentation and isolation in our modern society, that each generation is to some extent working towards these things independently, rather than together — a series of ironic new unintentional Generation Gaps. Some things never change. What intrigues me is trying to understand why some of the goals of recent social revolution have been substantially achieved, while others, just as urgently needed and just as worthy, have not. Here’s my scorecard, 1965-2007:
Two things seem to differentiate the successful movements from the failures: How easy it is to make the change, and the number of people who perceive that they have a personal stake in the change. Communities that are ethnically and racially integrated have been able to achieve greater cultural harmony than those that are segregated because it’s easier for them (they experience diversity daily), and because they are more likely to have neighbours of different cultures and ethnicity, so they have more at stake in getting along with them. The horrific cruelty to animals in factory farms is deliberately kept invisible to us, so we have no personal stake in their suffering, and we’ve been convinced by the Big Agriculture oligopoly that small family farms are not viable and that factory farmed foods are ‘economic’, so we perceive supporting local, small-scale, humane, free-range farming as too hard. The impact of the political lobbying and massive PR spending of the corpocracy (with full mainstream media complicity), has ensured that change that threatens established economic and political interests is seen as hard to achieve and ‘radical’, and change advocates have been deliberately ‘depersonalized’ so that peace activists, anti-globalists, pro-immigrant groups, the people of Iraq, environmentalists and ‘liberals’ are seen as ‘others’, and their labels stigmatized. We are easily brainwashed (by our aversion to change and fear of the unknown) to see them as dangerous, a bit weird, so we can’t relate to them, or their issues, personally (“what is ‘the environment’ they are talking about anyway, and how can I personally get worked up about the ozone layer and greenhouse gases — it’s just too abstract”). Those of us who have struggled unsuccessfully for the changes in the right column above have tended to beat ourselves — and each other — up for our failures, but we shouldn’t. We can’t care for something we can’t see, and life is challenging enough without being told that we must make hard changes — we will wait until we have no other choice, whether that’s too late or not. This is perhaps why the social revolution of the 1960s fizzled out in the early 1970s. Our causes were too hard and too abstract. Once we ended the War in Vietnam (which was hard but not abstract) we were spent. So what do we do, those of us still fighting for these causes, and those of us who’ve just discovered them? Find a way to make it easy. And find a way to make it real, personal. If you hate factory farming, work to invent plant-based meat substitutes that are inexpensive and delicious and taste like meat. And then smuggle a camera into the factory farm your meat comes from and show the film to your neighbours. Make it easy for them to change, andmake them care. My Dad told me that, forty years ago. He’s still teaching me. Happy Father’s Day, everyone. |
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Wonderful. Thank you.
Insightful. Many lessons then and now.Thanks!
Awesome, thanks!
Off topic, sorry — but, I found some more info on the mercury in CFL issue which I had metioned before: * If CFLs contain mercury which poses an environmental hazard, why are governments and *green* organization promoting these things?This will give you the big picture behind the whole pro-CFL efforts: Ironically, CFLs present an opportunity to prevent mercury from entering our air, where it most affects our health. The highest source of mercury in our air comes from burning fossil fuels such as coal, the most common fuel used in the U.S. to produce electricity. A CFL uses 75% less energy than an incandescent light bulb and lasts at least 6 times longer. A power plant will emit 10mg of mercury to produce the electricity to run an incandescent bulb compared to only 2.4mg of mercury to run a CFL for the same time.Source: NEMA.org (pdf file) [NEMA = National Electrical Manufacturers Association]the above was found at:http://thetaoofgoodhealth.com/things-you-should-know-about-mercury-in-cf-light-bulbs-8/in case you were interested too.
A great achievement of the hippies comes to mind every time I recall the experience of watching my children being born. In my father’s day, the pregnant woman was wheeled into a sterile operating room at the hospital, anesthetized, cut open, the baby was removed and whisked to another room and given a bottle. Eventually the father was notified. I was present in the comfortable birthing suite at the local hospital when my wife naturally delivered. the baby was laid on mother’s body and mom was encouraged to nurse the baby. I Held my wife’s hand during delivery and was there to comfort her throughout. I cut the cord and in other ways was made to feel part of the event. We prepared by attending birthing classes and learned tips to make the whole process go smoothly. The transformation of the birthing process from medical procedure to natural event–the humanizing of the process–was not the result of lobbying by nurses or doctors or AMA or insurance companies. It was the vision of the dope-addled freaks that broke through and reclaimed childbirth and remade it into something very different from what it was before.
Sorry, what was the value of Easing of Workplace Dress Codes? I’m not familiar with how it was “bad”, since I grew up with it to begin with.
For someone who wasn’t there, I appreciate the overview.
I’m glad you identified the 1965 – 1975 period as being a unique and significant period. I wish more people then had read and understood Carlos Castaneda. The way to inner (and outer) peace is, I think, to embrace your inner warrior.