You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
Question: What do you do when something doesn’t work?
Answer: Fix it.
Q: And what if it still won’t work?
A: You throw it in the trash.
Q: But what if it’s not a thing but a person?
A: You fire ’em.
Q: But what if they’re one of the family?
A: Now the situation gets difficult. Really difficult.
A misunderstanding of the “turn on, tune in, drop out” motto popularized by Timothy Leary in 1966 likely blinded most of us to the extent to which the hippie movement was rooted in college campuses. That is, the “drop out” part was assumed to mean quitting one’s studies, even though Leary later insisted he meant it as a discovery of one’s unique nature and self-reliance, a mission that should have been central to the college experience itself.
Revisiting the era as it blossomed in the late ’60s and early ’70s, I see how much of its energy came from college students and the circles they supported – musicians, artisans and craftspeople, small-scale entrepreneurs of all stripes, social activists, dealers. Not just students, either, but hip young faculty and their families – all overlapping.
Essentially, it meant dropping a lot of old assumptions and embracing new experiences and values.
The reality, then, is that relatively few hippies dropped out of college, at least over the long haul. Talk all you want about Gypsies or vagabonds, few hippies stayed out on the road for long. Most remained grounded right in the center of the action.
Days after what’s been dubbed the Thanksgiving Nor’easter, much of New Hampshire was left without electrical power. It wasn’t just people out in the sticks either, where homes are scattered and require long lines for connections. No, major sections of the largest cities were also affected.
It’s not that this is an isolated incident, either. Officially, this was the fourth worst outage ever — following December 2008, February 2010, and October 2011.
The electrical grid has become undependable, and that should have the utilities worried. Customers are given more incentive for seeking not just backup relief, mainly generators, but energy independence by means of solar and wind sources.
While many of the big-bucks folks have been insisting that global warming — or more accurately, climatic instability and upheaval — is a fabrication, these kinds of disasters fit right into the predictions they’re denying. And these kinds of events will just keep coming. Or should I say snowballing? The four worst within eight years? Think about it.
The other argument that comes to mind has to do with line maintenance. Again, the four worst in eight years. The utilities can plead all they want for rate hikes, but they’ll be facing increased hostility. Folks will ask, “Just what are we getting for our money?”
It’s safe to say that for somebody here, things are going to get worse before they get better. Or before the public, at least, turns the corner.
Can’t drive through the Big Dig – the tunnels that take Interstate 93 under Boston’s downtown – without thinking of the story of Remington the Rabbit.
Seems his first owner, a teen, named him after her favorite TV show at the time, Remington Steele, in honor of its star. The one she had a crush on.
And then, when she and her mother moved to England, Remington became a feature in another household, at least until they, too, had to move, this time into an apartment that didn’t allow pets.
So Remington, in his long life, spent his final days surrounded by three children who, from all accounts, treated him well and found their delight returned.
And then, when Remington’s days ended, their father provided the crowning touch. Seems Daddy was an engineer working on the Big Dig in Boston. And that’s where Remington was clandestinely buried.
Somehow seems fitting, amid all that steel, knowing there’s a rabbit in the works, somewhere over my head.
As I said at the time …
Globalization is another name for the passing of world dominance from the U.S.A. to the People’s Republic of China.
A country that cannot make uniforms for its soldiers is ill-armed, indeed. Especially when its biggest rival and potential enemy holds IOUs on a national debt. The irresponsible and tragic consequences of waging an unnecessary war one refuses to pay off. Somebody will have to pay.
For starters: wait until interest rates rise again, and pay that much more.
What could we expect from a president who’d fly halfway around the world to serve a plastic Thanksgiving turkey to the troops, as W did?
Yes, as I said at the time.
Getting ready for the trick-or-treaters tonight means bringing the box of decorations down from the loft of the barn, perhaps carving a jack o’ lantern or two, putting up some spooky lights, and making sure we have bags of candy ready for the kids who come knocking on our door between 5 and 8 p.m. (Dover’s officially sanctioned window).
For readers in other countries, I should perhaps explain America’s Halloween tradition of allowing children to go door to door, knocking or ringing the doorbell, and then calling out “trick or treat” and receiving a sweet morsel in return. In the old days, there was the veiled threat, “or else,” which often led to a prank like having your windows soaped – or worse. These days, it’s often a matter of having any pumpkins left out being smashed in the middle of the night, regardless of your good acts.
Over the years, though, the event’s lost a lot of its edge.
For one thing, as a result of tales about razorblades being found in apples and other urban myths, only commercially prepared and sealed products are acceptable as handouts – no more apples, little bags of homemade caramelized popcorn or cookies, or (my favorite) Rice Crispies squares. It’s almost universally little candy bars, door after door. Gone’s the wide variety you’d compare at the end of the evening. Of course, most kids get candy throughout the year, so it’s no longer the Other Christmas when it came to rare sweets.
For another, concerns about safety mean it’s rarer to allow children to roam on their own. In our neighborhood, at least, almost everyone’s accompanied by a parent – and many of them have better costumes than the kids. For that matter, they often seem to be enjoying it more, too.
The safety issue has led to some weird twists of its own. Manchester, for instance, moved the event to Sunday afternoon – broad daylight. As one neighbor kid at the time observed, how lame! There’s nothing spooky in that! And then there’s the going store to store in the malls. Even lamer.
The one vexing situation is the car that cruises slowly while their children go door to door. Get out and walk, please! You’re being asocial. Usually, these are people who don’t even live in the neighborhood but have chosen to live out in the country, “away from neighbors.” And now they want what they don’t offer in return.
I remember, especially, living in a neighborhood of modest townhouse rentals and seeing the BMWs and Mercedes cruising through. Nobody in the neighborhood could afford vehicles like those, and now we were expected to give their kids little gifts?
I had the urge for a little tricking on my own in return. If I only had a plan …
Another of the festering wounds of the ’60s and ’70s is the matter of illicit drug use. It wasn’t just hippies, actually, not once the troops in Vietnam turned to it, too.
It’s a troubling legacy on many fronts. For one thing, the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world – much of it regarding drug traffic. In other words, there’s a demand for the product, and if you believe in a free market, maybe you need to listen.
I won’t go into the history of banning many of the substances that are now verboten, even if it suggests a political tradeoff in repealing the Prohibition. But the basis of declaring the substances illegal appears to have been made on reasons other than the ones officially proclaimed. Let’s be honest about tobacco and alcohol, including their ability to be taxed, in contrast anything you might be able to grow on your own. (This, let me add, is coming from a former homebrewer.)
On the other hand, the widespread, frequent use of mind-altering substances among the young – and I’m including tobacco, alcohol, and activity-inhibiting legal prescriptions – leaves me deeply concerned.
That extends to the parents who give their kids pot … or even allow them to sell it at school.
That, in turn, points to a divergence between hippies and stoners.
Faced with a decision on the legalization of marijuana, I’m not entirely sure how I’d vote. But I do know the current policy isn’t working – and is doomed to continuing failure.
Why can’t we have a frank discussion on the issue … without all the hubris?
In drawing on the hippie era, I realize how many different strands there were to the movement. Mine happened to lead into a yoga ashram, and though we were drug-free and celibate, we were also at the crossroads of a lot of the hippie action.
All of that’s reflected in my Hippie Trails novels.
As I ponder the era, I also realize DL’s journey in those pages could just as easily turned toward underground violence, had he joined one of the cells of bombers targeting military research operations in frustration, and that version of the story probably would have had commercial publishing cachet. But to me, it would have been dishonest.
More meaningful to my vision is the comment by Mari (River Mama 5) to an earlier posting here:
Amazing how many different views there are. … Hippies to me were quite different. To me, it gave birth to great changes in our society. … I am quite thankful for … the back to the land movement and the Calvary Chapels churches that came to exist during this time. I came to know Jesus Christ in one of them.
They also pioneered living a simpler life … showing compassion to others. Taking care of this gift that is our planet. The “hippies” in America, were great artisans. As a weaver, quilter, and knitter, I look back at this time and find myself inspired by the way creativity roamed free among this way of living.
This is the side I wish to nourish and celebrate. And thank you, Mari and all the others, for sharing.
On my Monday free of the office, I drove up the palisades to nose around a picturesque river city in dull, mid-October weather. Looked at the signs. City Fish Market – Fresh or Smoked, down along the water. “Bill’s,” one door said; the other was “Private.” Down the main street from Doug’s Steak House, which was supposed to be THE place for Mississippi catfish, the town school stood in front of Lock and Dam No. 10.
I pulled into the Corps of Engineers parking lot as the Jack Wofford pushed its barges into the lock, noticed an observation tower, and climbed up to a deck occupied by mostly married retirees. But in the corner, more my age, was a woman in a London Fog trench coat and big boots, her long, black hair blowing in the cold wind. For a while I wondered if she was part of the pairs and quartets of older folks with their cameras who had come to view the autumn foliage and poke around the gift shops and galleries. She turned her head, noticed me briefly, turned back several times. Between twenty-five and thirty-two, I guessed. Proper makeup, classy.
Then, on the riverboat, a cook appeared at a door and fired back with his camera. She laughed.
Once the retirees beside her left, I asked her how the crews got their three lengths of barges – 3×3, for nine in all – out of the locks. “I don’t know,” almost a question. “I’ve never been here before.”
This time I noticed her crooked teeth. Began to wonder about games.
The cook emerged again, this time from the pilot house, and threw something, calculating for the wind. The object curved sharply at the last moment, into her fine catch. She unwrapped it a bit, saw it was a brownie with a phone number and address inside. She giggled to another old couple: “I think he’s had a lot of experience.”
Once the riverboat churned out of the lock, she descended to a powder blue Ford Torino, donned kid gloves with little holes for driving, and drove off.
The wrapper around her plates left me wondering if she was from the Henry County in Iowa or the one up in Minnesota.
I was left wondering, of course. Why so dressed up? And free on a Monday? That wasn’t a typical single person’s car. A professional, between stops? An art major, who gave it up for money? A government worker, with Columbus Day free? Off to a sweet rendezvous? Delightful divorced? Bored, with kids?
Me, at the time, with my own wife a thousand miles to the west, presumably finishing college.
It’s tune in, turn on, and take action in this tale of campus intrigue. Little does a small band in a remote college town realize its opposition to small-ante bureaucracy goes straight to the state capital. And then Washington and the Mekong Delta are another matter as the hippie movement hits tranquil Daffodil. Nothing will remain quite the same.
As the headline said:
BOTCHED DRUG BUST BACKFIRES.
When narcotics agents made an early morning knock-down-the-doors raid on the twelfth-floor of one of the high-rise dormitory towers, they turned up nothing – and were surrounded by irate residents before they could frame anyone, either.
“If you think the slaying of innocent students at Jackson State University was merely a racial atrocity,” Lakasha proclaimed, “you’re not seeing the big picture. It’s about an attack on civil rights – freedoms that belong to all of us. You don’t have to live in a big city to live in ghetto housing. Every student in Daffodil lives in a ghetto. Where I come from, we have a word for high-rise housing like these big dorms – the Projects. And the pigs who come charging into the Projects act just like those who busted in on the twelfth floor the other night. Never mind whether they find anything or not. Look, the university’s demanding that the students pay for the busted doors and busted furniture and busted walls. That’s why they call it a bust in the first place. Wake up, America! Demand the names of the ‘unnamed informants,’ the ones who were so wrong about the presence of illicit substances in those rooms. Wake up, I say! Mississippi’s closer to Daffodil than you think!”
~*~
To learn more about my novel, go to my page at Smashwords.com.
Jnana's Red Barn 