(crossposted from the frontpage of My Left Wing)
Author’s Note: Sometimes I write with our community in mind, and sometimes I speak through our community to the larger world, the one that encompasses DLCers, moderates, centrists and even wingnuts (whom I suspect are lurking in the dark). I almost always have more than a single audience in mind for any given diary. So please don’t take something I say personally if it’s obviously not meant for you. For example, my Chicago, ’68 graphic in this diary features a button that says ‘Give a damn! (this time)’. If you gave a damn last time or give a damn in general, this message is not for you.
(more below the fold...)
In ’69 I was seventeen. I attended Woodstock in August of that year as a devoted three-year veteran of the hippy movement, passionately opposed to the war then raging in Vietnam, and just as passionately devoted to the civil rights movement, the counterculture and the cause of peace. I was a hitchhiking fool and by the time of Woodstock I had been jailed, beaten or gassed in five different states. I was a pacifist and a fairly decent kid. I’m pretty sure that I did nothing to deserve such treatment.
"Love is the most powerful and still most unknown energy in the world."
~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Decent kid though I was, I was nevertheless subjected to violent brutality, as were many other decent kids of my generation. This is not to brag about or romanticize my generation; this is to underscore the violent and hateful nature of the opposition whom we continue to deal with to this very day. For someone who knows these guys like I (and so many others) do, it’s not surprising that they have been torturing people all over the world, that they love war as long as they don’t have to fight in it, or that they’ve ushered in corporo-fascism in America. It’s only surprising that the rest of us let them get away with it.
The hippies and their allies on the left tried to save us from these guys back in the day.
It’s hard to talk to people seriously about hippies, because the term is so ill defined, and because of the stereotypes spawned by the rightwing/mainstream propaganda machine. They’ve done to the word hippy what they’ve done to the words liberal and radical, and then some.
I think and speak of the hippies in the broadest sense of the term, and I use the term most affectionately. Many of those whom I think of as hippies may actually think of themselves as members of the counterculture, revolutionaries, leftists, radicals, non-conformists, freaks, yippies, diggers or individualists-who-forsake-all-labels. And even amongst those who would self-identify as hippies, there are infinite variations, multiple differentiated manifestations of the type. The movement was never and is not now monolithic. The common thread it seems to me is that they all stand way to the left of the mainstream culture, of which they are deeply critical, and reject its materialistic anti-people, pro-war and anti-planetary values.
The basis of world peace is the teaching which runs through almost all the great religions of the world. "Love thy neighbor as thyself." Christ, some of the other great Jewish teachers, Buddha, all preached it. Their followers forgot it.
~ Eleanor Roosevelt
I believe that our overall culture made a critical mistake back in the late 60s when the cultural mainstream bought into the rightwing propaganda and turned their backs on the hippies and the counterculture, siding finally with the rightwing conservatives when push came to shove. And believe me, push came to shove.
"Love is the only force capable of turning an enemy into a friend."
"Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."
~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
The mainstream rap on the history of the 60s is all too often that a bunch of malcontent radicals and dirty hippies were put in their place by the proper exercise of lawful authority. But it wasn’t like that. The rightwing conservative establishment waged wicked war on us and we were merely peaceful dissenters and demonstrators. Most of us were kids for crying out loud. We were NOT the bad guys, though we were often treated as such, and we have been much maligned in the national memory, and wrongly so, right up to the present day.
Why is this relevant today? Because we are at a similar juncture in history. We have come to a Y in the road, and the question is which path shall we take, the one to the right, or the one to the left? And the middle path is not a choice (sorry Buddha).
We had reached a similar Y in the road by the latter part of the 60s. After years of mounting tension the counterculture was attacked in earnest at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago where the police unleashed pure hell on thousands of peacefully demonstrating young hippies, peaceniks, and radicals beating them with clubs, gassing them, and hauling them to jail in droves. This brutal attack was called a ‘police riot’ by the mainstream press, shocked the whole world, and was entirely unprovoked and unjustified.
They did this, in my opinion, because the establishment felt terribly threatened by us – and all we were doing was peacefully protesting the war while advocating peace, love, and understanding. I believe that tells us something about the opposition. They were some mean bastards. They still are. They were and remain just the sort of guys you’d expect to be threatened by peace, love, and understanding. They’re grownup bullies and natural born warmongers. They are what we euphemistically refer to as conservatives.
And then there was the case of Kevin Moran...
The evening of April 18 saw Isla Vistans in the streets. With an assurance from Sheriff Webster that police would not enter Isla Vista, Associated Student Body President Bill James broadcast a request over KCSB for students to put out fires started by extremists. In response, three young men left their apartment to assist in calming the street situation. After putting out a fire at Taco Bell, they proceeded with others to the temporary Bank of America. They entered the broken glass door of the bank to put out a fire inside the structure.
Just then, a convoy of dump trucks bristling with riot police turned the corner and inched their way toward the bank. Having put out the fire, the three students started to exit. One of them, Kevin Moran, was shot and killed by a Santa Barbara City police officer as he stood at the broken door. The Sheriff's department immediately claimed Kevin had been shot by a "radical sniper" and issued an all points bulletin on the suspect, complete with a description of the "get away" car.
Less than a month after Kevin Moran's death, President Richard Nixon publicly acknowledged he widened the war in Southeast Asia to include Cambodia. Immediately, students at UCSB and others all across America rose in opposition to this escalation of the war.
I don’t know that there’s any point in playing ‘what might have happened but didn’t’ except to the extent that it might be instructive for the future. With that point in mind let me just say ‘what might have happened but didn’t’ is that the mainstream culture might have peeled away from the establishment and backed up the counterculture instead, and we might have changed this country profoundly and for the better. And if they had and we had, we wouldn’t be where we are today.
"To me, love, spirituality and life are all the same thing. To me they're all about honoring the circle, and they're just different ways of defining the same understanding. Our society as a whole, because we have placed our love for money above our love for life, has devalued the sacred and devalued love."
~ Julia Butterfly Hill
After all, what was it the counterculture wanted? Peace, a cessation of hostilities, a more loving and sustainable culture, equality for all. We basically wanted our government to adopt the physician’s oath, first do no harm. We wanted alternative energy and long-term social and ecological planning. We wanted to befriend the earth and each other, and we wanted to be a nation that befriended other nations.
I believe if the majority had turned toward us instead of away from us America would be a better place today, and the rest of the world would be much better off as well.
Some will say my analysis here is all wrong and it may well be, history is tricky that way, but one thing certain is that we got here by following a particular path, and we could have chosen a different one - but we didn’t.
I guess that is my real concern. What sort of path are we choosing today? Will we be driven by fear or wisdom? Will we choose war or peace? Will we befriend each other or kill each other? Will we go left or right? Peace and love, or fear and loathing?
That’s why I love the hippies, because they showed us the way.
If we were to become a more loving society at all levels, the majority of my political needs and objectives would be met. We would take better care of those in need. We would make sure that people got a fair shake. We would implement policies that genuinely reflected our concern and regard for every citizen. We would relate to each other and the rest of the world with compassion, kindness, charity and justice. Everything I yearn for, everything I believe is just, fair and desirable comes back down to love - and all that flows from it.
I will always love John Lennon for many reasons, but if for no other reason than because he wrote All You Need is Love.
I will also always love Joan for bravely bringing the same message.
That was a bold message, and a true one – and one embraced by the hippies. Realists and pragmatists often laugh at such a notion – but it’s understood by the wise. Love is a force and among humans, it is the greatest force there is. It is capable of overcoming almost anything. That is not to say that it always does, only that it is capable of it. If we can summon up sufficient love for the planet, we may save it, and if we can summon up sufficient love for each other we may learn to live in peace. Gandhi understood this, as did Jesus, Gautauma Buddha, Martin Luther King and John Lennon among others. But it’s a dangerous message; and those who carry it are often killed for their troubles.
Note: I don’t mean to imply that all of those pictured above were killed for their message of peace and love, but those of them who weren’t are probably at risk of it.
It’s odd to think of love as a dangerous message, it seems so innocent, gentle and benign, but it undeniably is. It threatens the opposition like no other thing. Nothing threatens those who thrive on hatred, bloodlust and war like peace, love and understanding. Whatever would the meanest assholes on the planet do if the rest of us embraced each other as brothers and sisters?
I believe that our society desperately needs to reject conservatism as the final refuge of hate-meisters and warmongers, and embrace the liberal, progressive left and the love that animates and inspires them. We need to get past materialism, greed and hatred so that we can finally address humanity’s real and pressing problems in a responsible and loving way.
"Hate is not conquered by hate: hate is conquered by love. This is a law eternal."
~ Buddha
Because of my history I can only see the present circumstances as yet another conflict between the forces of life and the forces of death. Will the richest nation on earth reject unjust war, bring its soldiers home, quit torturing people, uphold human rights, insure the health of all of its citizens, and otherwise learn to care for each other, the planet and for others, or will we go the all-war-all-the-time route and just torture and kill anybody who gets in our way while we fritter away what remains of the planet’s ability to sustain life? Will we learn to harness the power of love, or will we let fear and madness drive us over the cliff?
"If we could raise one generation with unconditional love, there would be no Hitlers...Mankind's greatest gift, also its greatest curse, is that we have free choice. We can make our choices built from love or from fear."
~ Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
I am ashamed of our politicians for failing to stop the madness.
I fear that we have lost all control over them, that they now belong to the military-industrial complex and whatever the military-industrial complex wants the military-industrial complex gets.
I dearly hope that I am wrong, because God help us if that is what we’ve come to.
It’s well past time for us to reconsider the path our culture and nation are on, and not in small incremental ways, but in large, wrenching, revolutionary ways. We should not be afraid of changing the sorry spectacle of fascism in America. Radical problems like the ones we now face call for radical solutions. That’s why I don’t mind being called a radical. I am radical enough to believe it doesn’t have to be like this in America – and extreme left and still hippy enough to seriously believe that love is the answer.
And it’s high time we stop being afraid of words like radical, revolutionary, liberal or love. These are all perfectly good words, and in the right context any one of them may in fact be le mot juste (the righteous word).
"There is a Law that man should love his neighbor as himself. In a few hundred years it should be as natural to mankind as breathing or the upright gait; but if he does not learn it he must perish."
~ Alfred Adler
