The Sixties: So You Can Remember
September 1990

Unlike so many of the "sixties personalities" now being paraded through the media as typical of that period, I never lived in Haight Ashbury (although I visited the San Francisco area from time to time), nor did I ever believe that "the revolution is coming" during the 1960s and 70s, nor have I ever wished to "die before I get old". Yet I feel, as do my close friends, that we were profoundly a part of "the sixties" and that it affected our lives in a multitude of ways. Of the numerous books and articles which have come out recently about the period, most dwell on the activity which was the most concentrated: the Haight, SDS, the underground press. Of course, understanding these is important. But the essential character of the sixties was as a time when a million minds and hearts took leadership and created reality, an explosion of creative energy fueling itself. And each group that it affected and that in turn created the times has its own common history, less widely known than that of the more publicized centers, but just as valid. Los Angeles, Santa Cruz, New York, Wisconsin, Boston, Paris, and all the little pockets of hippiedom in between had their own story within the larger community of which we also felt part.

I smoked my < first > grass a month after the Haight Ashbury had already declared the Hippie media creation dead (in November of 1967), and a month before "everybody started to leave for the country" - and didn't even drop my first psychedelics until a year and a half later (June of 1968). Throughout that year (1967-68) my circle of close college friends sprouted long hair and colorful clothes and found each other . . . creating group homes and learning vegetarian cooking and moving to the country through 69, 70, and 71 - years after the Haight had turned into a down scene, our sixties was at its height. (In particular, I remember 1968 not as the year of turmoil and horrors and ending that the media is now painting it to be, but as one of the happiest in my life.) For me, the sixties occurred on through the seventies with group houses, part-time jobs, art, moving to Berkeley, shopping at the co-op, activism, and friends.

Even though the press had announced loudly that the sixties and idealism were dead, I never felt that the sixties were in the past until 1986. I had gone to collect mail at the group house I had recently moved out of and was asked to turn in my key and start knocking on the door. This had never happened to me before: in hippie culture, there was always a feeling of being part of one big family of hippies, of houses being just necessary amenities for urban areas where one couldn't put up a tent or live outside, of "Hey, come by whenever you need to". Suddenly it came to me that most of the residents of the house, although politically active and living alternative lifestyles, were in their mid- to late-twenties, had not lived through the sixties, had not experienced the "family of man" feelings which many of us who did live through the sixties were still trying, against ever mounting odds, to live by everyday.

Not that the sixties hadn't produced sweeping changes, the effects of which were still manifesting themselves. But fewer and fewer people were living the sixties, with the same fresh awareness of the specialness of life, with that sense of greater purpose and the questioning of convention, with the flowingness, the weaving of moments and movements into a dance. The trappings could still be seen here and there - the clothes, the music, the crafts, the funkiness, the sarcasm - but convention had closed in again.

Saul Landau bemoans the fact that, while in Europe students learn the history of recent struggles from those who lived through them, in the U.S. every new freshman class at college, for instance, has no idea how very recently the liberties it enjoys - co-ed living, free speech, and to be politically active, etc. were won, and what it took to accomplish this.

It's time to remind ourselves of what it was to "be" in the sixties, and to tell the new generation coming up. Those were days permeated with magic, times of spontaneous peaceful anarchy, freshness. A time of realization that all life is transitory, but that life still goes on: times of information and of communication, when community could form and reform, disperse and coalesce as instant posters, newspapers, music, households. A time for the luxuries of sleeping outdoors, eating and sleeping and bathing together, being really happy, feeling wonderful to be allowing yourself to be pulled along by forces you felt good about. A world where anything could happen - and where something magical always happened when you needed it: food appeared, rooms got painted with fantasy murals, people gave each other books, money, trips. And you could say thank you by just flowing with it, giving to the next person. Like being in love -first love - , everything was unforgettable, larger than life.

As in Poland's Solidarity movement, and like the early sixties Freedom Riders reporting back to the campuses, we were living out the dream of a life based on love as if it were real < whether or not it was real >.

When I fought my own battles was when I was a hippie. Fights over mistakes on W-2 forms, job promotions, parking tickets, the post office losing mail, doctors not able to make an appointment for six months - these are all very necessary battles; but they are battles for survival in a dog-eat-dog world. In the sixties, our battles were rather about greater freedom for the individual, about gaining greater control over the forces/pushes and pulls (from large institutions like the army, the university, the government) that shape lives, about tearing down obstacles to wholeness and healthiness. We were exploring the extent to which we have control over our lives, and the extent to which an individual, or a group of like-minded individuals, can have an effect on society.

I hope and want to believe that it can/will happen again. But it needs the right chemistry of times, place, and people to flow. You can be a hippie, an outsider, a non-comformist, by yourself anywhere, anytime, in any situation, as Daniel Ellsberg found out in publishing the Pentagon Papers. In fact, one of the most perfect "hippies" could be said to be eden ahbez (the lower case is his choice), composer of the song `Nature Boy', which Nat King Cole made famous. eden is shown in Life Magazine in February 1948 with his long hair and sandles and blue jeans, vegetarian diet and hand-made musical instruments, living in a tent with his lady friend and giving away gifts to strangers. < In 1948 >. eden didn't seem to need anyone to be freaky with.

But the special time that was the sixties came about through a magical flowing interchange among a group of like-minded folk. . . a tribe.


BEGINNINGS

Todd Gitlin and Tom Haydn have reported on what went on in inner New Left political circles during these years. Both accounts are very interesting and informative, but both fonder or give up in their attempts to describe why the New Left suddenly became so successful (a success which actually was the death of the official "organizations" of the left, which were unprepared to handle large numbers of new people for very long, a characteristic of the stable, longterm organizations which they did not want to become).

For the first time, they both note, the Old and New Left gave demonstrations and < thousands > of people showed up. Gitlin also notes (you can almost feel him scratching his head), that "Without any central coordination, protests nonviolent and violent accelerated throughout the [spring of 1969 to spring of 1970], chiefly against the war - fully 9,408 incidents of protest. . ." And demonstrations continued through 1972 throughout the country, with no easily tracable central planning.

I was one of those formerly uninvolved students who went to those demonstrations. Looking back, it's easy to fall into wondering why I wasn't more active, knowing what I know now. But, coming from an essentially a-political family (meaning a family in which involvement in politics was all talk and no action), it took a long time to develop enough understanding of the waves breaking around me to feel confident in how I should involve myself. And the factor that got me involved back then, with all my overriding uncertainties, was the social nature of the sixties culture, the ways in which it was a < social > as well as political movement. Getting involved in politics was just one of the things you did as part of the tribe, which made you part of the tribe. The hippies were one of the few social movement in the U.S. to become a mass movement. The U.S. is not used to mass social movements. Political movements (populists, unions, the Birch Society etc.) have been powerful forces throughout our history, but social/lifestyle movements have been limited to such eccentric groups as the early commune builders, the Mormons, the Pennsylvania Dutch and the Shakers, the Catholic Workers, weird cults and occult groups of Los Angeles, none of which made much of a dent in the larger culture. After, all, a non-family tribe is a very unusual institution, based on very delicate connections: a conspiracy laced together with face to face contact based on implied understandings.


In Europe, lifestyle groups are more familiar. Usually they have been limited to core groups either of religious brethren or of artists and intellectuals, but often entire periods of art and intellectual history are characterized by them. Victor Hugo's Romantic army of 1830 Paris; John Ruskin, the Pre-Raphaelite painters, William Morris, and the Arts and Crafts Movement (1860s- ); the turn of the century Art Nouveau period which spread through the cafes of Vienna, London, Paris, Munich, Barcelona, Glasgow, and the homes of San Francisco; the Impressionists; the Surrealists; the Dadaists; and the Cubists - all were accompanied by networks of friendships, social gatherings, eccentric events, and eccentric living arrangements, which often spilled over into eccentric communities, such as Montmartre in the 1890s (with Toulouse-Lautrec, Jarry, Bonnard, Gide, Mallarme, etc); in the 1910s (with Utrillo, Apollinaire, Braque, Modigliani, Derain, Picasso and others); the 1920s (the time of Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, etc.); and the 1930s (as described and lived by Henry Miller and Anais Nin).


The bohemia of Paris dissolved during World War I (1914-18) as its members went off to and died in that war, and again during the German occupation of France during World War II, but as soon as possible after both, young artists and intellectuals hungry to create again met to share "a life of one adventure after another" in the cafes. Saint-Germain-des-Pres was the main hang-out in the late 40s and the 50s, "a sort of village in the midst of the big city", where "it didn't matter whether or not one was broke. If one of us had a dime, we paid for our friends." Among the participants was Jean Cocteau, Jean Genet, Colette, Edith Piaf, Maurice Chevalier, Albert Camus, Andre Gide, Jean-Paul Sartre, Salvador Dali, Roger Vadim, and a host of other aspiring artists, drawn there by the evening scene and le jazz americain.

The journalists dubbed this new bohemia the "existentialists" (much to the annoyance of Sartre who felt it was a corruption of the meaning he had given the word), and the merchants often gave them credit, for they served to popularize the discotheques and basement clubs, and provided front page gossip for the newspapers which drew others to the scene.

But this time (and ever after) it would be different. With the post-war growth of the media, the tightly-knit cultural group would be the first to be disrupted by popularization and commercialization. As Roger Vadim reports, "The eagerness of the media and local merchants to turn to their advantage a spontaneous movement, which was more a lifestyle of peaceful anarchy than a political or intellectual attitude based on Jean-Paul Sartre's philosophy, didn't bother us at all. However, it was not long before the real postwar Saint-Germain was killed by this verbal pollution and turned into the amusement park that it is today."

The French counterculture had a wider effect, though. It led directly into the French New Wave cinema boom. Beginning with Roger Vadim in 1956 and Louis Malle in 1957, in 1959 and 1960, 67 new directors made their first feature films, including Godard (Au Bout de Souffle), Truffaut (Les Quatre Cent Coups), Resnais Hiroshima Mon Amour, Chabrol, Rohmer, Lelouch and many others, many of them members of the St. Germain crowd, who would lead the European film scene into a new period of diversity and creativity. In London, similar developments were afoot. In February 1956, `Free Cinema', the first of a series of programs held at the National Film Theatre, sparked a theatre renaissance, including `Look Back in Anger', a play taken from a book by John Osborne. The members of this creative revival came to be referred to as "Britain's Angry Young Men".

At about the same time, after the war, a similar movement formed in the "Paris of the U.S.", San Francisco, where Lawrence Ferlinghetti had moved in 1953 and opened a bookstore. Poetry readings, cafes, music, and a general outburst of creative energies appeared in the old Italian North Beach section within a few years, dubbed the "Beat" culture by the media. But again, media attention brought destruction. By 1958 tour buses started pouring tourists into the area, and within a year the two main gathering places, The Place and The Coexistence Bagel Shop, shut down and creative energies dispersed.

But strangely, these centers of creative ferment no sooner are dissipated in one place than they spring up in another. The nexus's don't disappear. The participants move on, becoming seeds to other creative spurts, as happened again after tourist buses disrupted the Haight Ashbury community in spring of 1967. It seems that the modern world must have its bohemias, and no matter how co-opted or squelched, they keep re-surfacing.

`Beat', some say, stood for `beatitude', though there was more of a "down and out, knocked around" feel to beat culture than there was to hippie culture, with the latter's emphasis on getting healthy and taking control of your life. Beatnick culture, coming as it did so soon after the horrors of World War II, was definitely less hopeful, less trustful of itself, older, less able to deal with fluidity of category, and still imbued with the prejudices and uptightness that were later lightened by the civil rights movement, the coming of the birth control pill, the surpassing of Freudian psychoanalyses, and the loss of faith in the old left. The uncontained release of the beats also become tempered by the sixties incipient Thoreauian realizations that humankind must begin to learn to keep its desires somewhat under control in order to live with nature, even fully and freely. Nevertheless the inspired energies of the movement and search for spiritual growth that Kerouac described in On The Road, Dharma Bums, The Subterraneans, and others of his stories, and music and grass and poetry and eastern philosophy were carried into hippie culture. And through them young white suburban kids got in touch with black culture, from which the music and grass originated, as well as a loosening up of Puritanical behavior norms.

In suburban Los Angeles, the popular subculture of the immediate pre-hippie era were the surfers, and with them I think the hippie movement shared hedonism and the wish to stay forever young. The other culture which had an influence was the Mods and Rockers of Britain, of which most of us were only dimly aware, but which nevertheless influenced us - through the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, the mini-skirt, Carnaby Street, and the fantasy that was Liverpudlian.

Other important influences were "old" ideas that we recovered: William Morris's socialist Arts and Crafts Movement and the period of appreciation of nature which was Art Nouveau; Isadora Duncan's and Thoreau's search for naturalness; Herman Hesse and the German "Wunderkind" movement, co-opted by the Nazis; the spiritual community and loving world view of St. Francis of Assisi; and finally the comaradery of the Wobblies and the hobos. The influence of freaky circus subculture and of comic book heroism can be seen as well, especially in the arts.

We not only reached back, but we also reached geographically out. The sixties was the first time when records and movies from abroad reached a broad audience; we were also able to travel, in greater numbers than Americans had ever been able previously. It became possible to spend a college year abroad, or take off with a backpack for a summer, or after graduation.

One of the results of this were influences from the Dutch Provos, perhaps the most important of all, whose public theater actions started around 1964. The Provos grew out of a society which had long ago faced the scary reality that humans are interdependent, and whoever gets to the wealth first had better share it around, or there are soon a few powerful and a great many disenfranchised. The Provos believed even more extremely than the rest of Dutch society in the community providing for the individual, and did anarchist street theatre to promote their opinions. What set them apart from earlier radical movements was the playful cheerfulness of their "happenings". ["I won't be in xxx revolution if I can't dance" said xxx.] From protestors with painted clown faces defending themselves against police truncheons with sticks of rhubarb, to white-painted bicycles which were left around the streets to be borrowed by whoever needed them, the Provo influence can be seen in the Haight's hippie diggers and their street theatre, free food, free stores, frames of reference, and instant newspapers. (Happily, unlike the U.S. hippies, the Provos had the support of much of their (Dutch) society. Unlike in the U.S., they went on to become a political movement, electing people to Parliament by 1967.)

But the biggest influence on us was probably that we found ourselves living in a time of vast and rapid change. In only one lifetime, life had gone from a predominantly rural existence with candles, milking the cow, and dirt floors, to automobiles, insurance, income taxes, electric bills, television, supermarkets, metropolis's, specialization, computers, neighborhoods where people moved so often that childhood friends would soon disappear, and other new complexities & complications. Most of our elders had little knowledge of how to live in such a world. No one was there to tell us how to adapt, or to avoid adapting, to all of this, how to use it in our lives, or how to avoid having our lives wrecked by it. If there was one thing that could push the children of the slumbering, apathetic, don't-rock-the-boat middle class into change it was such a level of stress.


SNEAKY SUBLIMINAL ADVERTISING FOR LIFE

What is it we wanted? Some (including futurist Herman Kahn) have characterized the sixties as the typical self-absorption of the third generation of a family or people pulling itself up to material comforts and security. The first generation, they say, struggles; the second generation maintains or consolidates what the first managed to gain; the third, born into the wealth, forgets the hardships of that wealth's creation, and squanders its wealth in gluttony. So the hippies have been characterized as hedonistic children of the middle class (the U.S. 50s middle class was the largest, and perhaps the most comfortable, that the world had ever seen), satiated with its new wealth, like a child that tires of its toys and looks for new ones.

But, the way we saw it, the third generation was struggling again, trying to forge ahead to a new level, not just for itself, but for humanity as a whole: exploring the idea that there's something more to life then the day-to-day grind, the 9-to-5 don't-argue-with-your-boss job, the come-home-exhausted-and- turn-on-the-television-heat-up-a-tv-dinner existence. We had seen the height of western civilization, and somehow it didn't work. We were materially comfortable, but we felt like losers. A review of the college best-sellers of the 60s - Catcher in the Rye, Franny and Zooey, Siddhartha, On The Road, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me - indicates that the search of the generation of the 60s was a spiritual search. Faced with the poverty of wealth, we were looking for the rest of what is supposed to go with heaven on earth, once material security has been gained: love, justice, friendship, truth, clarity, vision. We were saying that material security is not enough if its capture requires the non-existence of the rest of the attributes of a human life.

Our parents, coming of age in the 30s and during the hardships of World War II, hoped mostly for the chance to earn a decent wage for a day's labor, to work reasonable hours with reasonable security of a continuing income; for the chance to own their own homes and afford health care and labor-saving devices.

We were looking to add to this the chance to be creative, peaceful, happy, loving. We were the first generation, perhaps, to be able to ask for this in large numbers, to be able to make choices based on these values (even though in the end, the choices were still made painfully.)

We didn't do activism and spiritual search out of ingratitude or guilt; we did them because we had reached the stage of humanity where we were incomplete without them. We (as middle class) felt responsible for taking things to the next step - a world of material as well as psychic well being. That's what we were here to do. We had to bring the human side into things as a primary focus. Otherwise we'd get spaceships blasting off to form space colonies as the world lay dying, or future cities covered with glass where food was paste coming out of a tube and people still didn't talk . . . like Disney's Tomorrowland. Otherwise it'd be the same old empty monotonous material song over and over for eternity. It was like giving the big final push before the child pops out. (We didn't know it was the last time human culture would so easily attain such material comforts, that the resources to create Tomorrowland were never really there anyway. Magazines were filled with articles about how the world would spend its leisure time when machines released us from labor and other futuristic utopianism.)

Things have changed so much that it is sometimes hard to remember what our agenda was, but one of the strongest items was surely the need for community. The need for community was nearly unrecognized in American thought: the U.S. mentality was similar to the ethic for automobile drivers: each person was supposed to take responsibility for their own, and avoid making contact with ("hitting") anyone else. But by the fifties, people were changing residences so often that our nuclear family was the only community with which we could expect to have any continuity. When these were dysfunctional, there wasn't much else.

The fifties and early sixties were the time of the anti-hero novel: Salinger, Updike, Donleavy, Bellows, etc; their themes of seperateness, loneliness, alienation, anonymity brought this into focus. Paul Simon's songs also gave voice to the alienation of the times: "I am a rock, I am an island . . .". In high school and college in the fifties, you were part of either the in group or the out group. Either way you felt alone . . . and you thought you were the only one who felt alone.

Not only did we feel alone, but we were even suspicious of each other. We watched each other to see how to be. It was normal to be uptight. Suburbia with its blocks of single-family houses, often with no community center, and rarely with any ethnic character was a rootless, historyless existence with traditions at most a generation or two old. This was especially true in California, which gave birth to the hippie phenomenon. I remember my parents' being sure they were the only Democrats in the whole neighborhood - until I poll-walked for LBJ in 1964. We were unaware that others felt as lonely as we did.

Rock idolism and Beatlemania were probably one of the first manifestations of the need for community: teen-agers shouting in a group, collecting memorabilia, having a common dream.

Rock music itself was a powerful antidote. Not just, as Michael Ventura recently noted [Hear That Long Snake Moan, Shadow Dancing], in that its beat brought body and spirit back together in the African tradition, but also in that it gave people the ability to create < together > in groups. This was not true of classical and pop, which are created by individuals, but then performed by skillfully orchestrated groups. Rock was a return to the traditional group-based music forms of folk and tribal music. One person could pick up a drumstick and start a rhythm, another could start a lead line over it, while the bassist added another layer.

The music came first for many. It called to us, hidden in our stuffed-shirt look-alike disguises, called to us subliminally to rediscover the poetry in our life and our bodies that the society denied.

As we recognized each other, we began to clump together, so that the community could go on night and day. It started with college enclaves like Westwood, Isla Vista, Berkeley, Santa Cruz, Boston, Madison, Greenwich Village: living in a village for the first time in our lives created energy released just from proximity. I remember in particular college as a place where at any time one could find someone else who wanted to go to a movie, get a pizza, sit and talk, play guitar. It was really a new experience not being lonely. (And, in LA, not needing a car to socialize.)

I believe that the great Hashbury influx was fueled by this search for neighborhood/community. To be able to spend all your time in a group that recognized itself as a group was an incredible high, like the feeling of shopping in a small community organic grocery store - the shared conspiracy, meeting old friends. Communes created a community of tribal size, larger than a family (which is so small that there can be inescapable modes of relating and ingrown avenues of hostility); smaller than a school or a company or a city (which are big enough that you are lucky to run into the same person twice in one day). Several social thinkers have noted the shortage of tribal-sized entities within western culture (E. F. Schumacher in Small Is Beautiful, Leopold Kohr in The Overdeveloped Nations), and the lack this creates in people's psyches.

Also communes provided a midway alternative between living alone (after you've left your family) and living in a relationship (whether it be a going-steady, a partnership, or a marriage) - a new choice that had never been available before. It took the disgrace out of being single; you could be single and still have people around. It slowed down the rush to get settled into a relationship.

One thing people often recall about their feelings about John Kennedy was his ability to articulate a vision of the future about which there was some consensus. When JFK was killed, a void opened up where that sense of community had been. This was partly filled in the hippie community by the rebirth of the troubadour, the griot, the towncrier - Dylan, the singer-songwriter - and the overcoming of Tin Pan Alley moon-and-june lyrics. At the same time as rock music tied us together, we also had someone to tell us the community news, outside of the straight press and the blabbering tv. The community of the sixties also came into being through its songs and writings: the music and newspapers was like listening to yourself talk (Bob Dylan: `listening to one of my own tongues'): the songs said it all so well, we could use them to express our thoughts - they were our thoughts, our poetry. Songs and poems gave us the words to find each other and communicate about important things outside what was then the standard and the expected, and to continue visualizing the future from the present.

The image of what was happening has perhaps been best expressed in Kattutta, a play by the Inuit (Eskimo) Tukak' Teatret of Greenland, which shows the Inuit view of the changes brought to them by western culture. As the formerly close community members are forced to learn new ways and a new language, the actors gradually appear hidden from each other behind masks, unable to recognize each other or speak together to communicate their deep feelings. Each can only see the other's persona. Only when they begin to get their ways and language back are they able to communicate their innermost thoughts again.

In much the same way, the clothes and language and ways which we adopted made it possible to recognize each other. In the magic connection that this created, things could happen like seeing someone on the street and playing an unspoken scene with them: no hellos, goodbyes, formalities, cause you know each other's cores, you're on a mobius strip and you'll be meeting again . . . or your friends will be meeting. There could be a trust in the tribalness. It seemed as if we were always running into friends, or friends of friends, even in distant corners of the globe, because it was so easy to recognize each other. And, for a blessed if very short period, even when another hippie wasn't an acquaintance, you felt as if you knew each other anyway.

This mode of defining who was a friend was in itself, of course, a break with the norm. Most people make their friends through neighborhood contact, through school, through their church or their work. And there is a strong push to choose friends because of their social position, not just a similar social position to your own, but because someone you get to know might be able to help you in your career. Even wives might traditionally be picked to help, or at least not hinder, in this way. The sixties instead proposed the radical idea that people might be friends just because they live on the same planet with similar concerns and delights.

But the sixties ethos took things even one step farther. Love outside of the proper social context made and still makes us uncomfortable. It's ok in the proper "festival" atmosphere - office parties, Mardi Gras, Armistice Day - to express love for a stranger or new acquaintance, but even that is never expected to be more than momentary, temporary. The kindness of strangers is unexpected; for them to not remain strangers is even more so. But what about telling someone you like them < in everyday life out of a relationship >? Love between family members, or between man and wife is expected - even mandated - but love between friends? Immediately, there is a search for the love to become manifested by a relationship along familiar traditional lines, if not of boyfriend/girlfriend, than as an affair. Walking the edge of a defined relationship is just too tense. And what of non-erotic non-homosexual love between two people of the same sex, or between an older and younger person not related by family ties?[from Go]

The sixties freed up people (for a short time) to be loving outside of the traditional "love" relationships on a temporary or ongoing basis in everyday life. We could tell our friends we loved them, tell strangers at Love-ins and other festivals, set up relationships that defied traditional descriptions. Sometimes this happened without even the need to discuss "liking" or "loving", as in moving in together, without formal announcement, just to see where the feelings would lead, with an attempt to stay away from the traditional relationship patterns.

The more-traditional "love" relationships were also changed by community. We struggled with how to transform the old ideas of male / female relationships that allowed a relationship to continue even when love was not there or when one or both members were emotionally-blind or crippled, leaving important parts missing. Instead of the old loyalty / fear / illegitimate kids trio which held a great many relationships together previously (at least until the kids were grown), the community allowed us to back away from a bad relationship back into a support group, or to use group pressure to change things. It was the allowance to "go for broke" - real love (or close to it) or not at all. Community was a strong antidote to meaninglessness in other standardized institutions (high school clubs, scout troops, church groups, sororities, schools, the army). In response to these, we favored anarchist impromptu political groups for specific purposes: to hold a demonstration about a specific issue. As community grew stronger, we began to create alternative institutions: Stores appeared in which there was no separation between customer and owner; customers bagged their own food, poured their own coffee. There was a feeling that this was "our" place. Experimental colleges and day schools for kids were created as alternative, participatory institutions. Communes for both living and working appeared. Newspapers proliferated. Where we couldn't create alternatives, we tried to remake the institution, or avoid it altogether. The conformity required of a 9-to-5 job-holder we tried to replace with part-time jobs like selling ice cream or newspapers, gardening, waitressing, teaching classes, and the like. It was a necessary shift in any case, since many of us were trained for white-collar-professional jobs, but by the time we got out of college, few were open to us. So we would have to find our own way to survive, in the cracks. We became the temporary faculty at junior colleges, the midwives, the crafts-people, the head-shop proprieters, the day-care teachers, the event-promotors, the bands and the roadies for bands. Hippies dropped out not because they liked poverty per se, but because it was necessary for the attainment of greater goals: not taking the same boring uncreative type of jobs your parents were stuck with; getting an education for education's sake, not just as training for a career; getting off the wheel of the little boxes on a hillside. Being an artist or a hippie is a way to be rich without money. Through community, we gave each other the freedom or room to experiment. Since we had as yet few possessions, jobs, status, etc, banding together was a bulwark. It said, "Come over here - Here you can be free and funky." . . . .

Being part of a community gave us a feeling of power for the first time in our lives, power to have some small say over the way history was rocking and rolling things around, of the huge effect which distant government entities had come to have on our lives. It's no accident that the disappointment over the reasons for and the nature of the war on Vietnam coincided with the realization that we had reached the end of the American frontier. Vietnam symbolized the last time we could hope to throw our weight around, take on another power and bend it to our will.

It also coincided with the growth of large institutions, in which more and more of us were involved. Here, this powerlessness had become especially uncomfortable. The growing reality was one of being hemmed in to making just small adjustments, not rocking the boat too much, as we became more dependent on mundane corporate jobs where thinking becomes controlled and interpersonal disputes leave one continuing to work together. The old wild west shoot-em-up and ride-on, I-make-my-own-rules ethic had no place in the new bureaucracies, and the wish for such slashing-of-the-Gordion-knot solutions probably had much to do with the growing popularity of John Wayne's characters, comic books, and other sources of larger-than-trivial problem-solving. It was a mistake, that dream, because the institutions are with us more than ever, and the only way to deal with them is to become a more mature, other-respecting society, like Japan and Europe. But it would take a generation to feel out how to balance our drive toward individualism (both personally and nationally) with the reality of a shrinking interconnected world. . . . . As Americans, we were taught that we are/were each and all special and unique (individuals each with their own talents and path through life). To reach this goal fully, we had to move out of ALL roles (male and female, student and teacher, politician and citizen, etc). But beyond this, we were also reacting to stifling over-specialization. An experience which really brought this home to me occurred during The Strike (1971), when many of us either stayed away from our classes, or went to our classes only to talk about the Cambodian bombing and ask others to stay away. We knew that we had no power, but we felt we had to use whatever small power we had to make our statement about what our country was doing to other peoples of the world. One of my teachers, an excellent, well-known artist, was visibly be-fuddled by the whole situation, and reacted with an "I'm only an artist" argument. He had spent most of his life becoming good at what he did and getting public recognition for it, and was fairly content that he was doing his best for his culture and society; and to be confronted with the idea that he do more, that he step outside the role he and society had defined for him, was just too much. Under the cloak of specialization, it was normal to be only part of a human. Politicians took care of politics, science was nerdy engineers, the humanities and the arts were a rarefied intellectual world, and business was business.

The sixties proposed instead the idea of non-specialization as an important component of being a human. We went beyond even participatory democracy to the ideal of the Renaissance human: people should be able to take care of themselves and others in many ways, should be balanced in their talents. And we tried to achieve this goal; people were able (thanks to part-time jobs and the good economy) to do lots of things themselves, try lots of things: someone might be beading their own shirts, making candles, learning to play bass, painting murals on their house walls, inventing computers, testing scientific theories, creating new products, in addition to being a student or to their job. And this carried over into a revolt against other standard forms of art, career, and life. New hybrids were able to form and not be slapped into old categories: standard categories like rock vs. folk vs. jazz in music; wholistic medicine; new careers like conflict resolution; ranges of sexuality. Similarly, the definition of relationships was purposefully kept loose. We avoided asking "Are they married? Is s/he gay?" or cutting someone out of our lives because they were from a different class. We questioned everything, back to basic assumptions. There was a self-ordained stretching of the mind, breathing in the weaving, that was the subtle underlying force.

But going even deeper, hippies liked to hang out where identities, time, and other boundaries were fluid - even murky, where meanings were multiple, and the lines were not clearly drawn between good and bad, love and hate, joy and sorrow, reality and acting. We relished finding ourselves in "twilight zones," magical "borderlands" where the "little people" might almost be doing their thing, ripe with possibilities and potentials. We allowed ourselves to stay in the nether world, the ambivalence. Tripping especially taught us the silliness of asking "Where am I? What time is it?" about a new experience. Out of this grew the atmosphere at happenings and love-ins, Beatles records and radio montages, collage art, things intermixing together, and the belief in the magic of the rain stopping for Donovan's concert at the Hollywood Bowl. [If something really "happened", it meant there was magic.]

Staying in this kind of space turned out to have an added benefit: < learning to deal with an unstable world >, a world of more choices, but therefore more pressure and stress to find yourself. We gained an ability to accept ambiguity, fluidity, to live in a much more fluid world, to deal with constant change. Like the Native American who recently responded to suggestions that his tribe take up some new practice with the answer, "Yes, we're considering it, we're watching how it goes. When it comes around again, we just might give it a try," we were learning to stand where we were, with our newly developing sense of self, and watch the waves breaking around us.

We had our feelers out for change. We learned for example, to be cautious about rigidifying our lives, for example, by not picking a career too soon or marrying. The world was unstable enough that we didn't want to get tied down, in case we had to change fast.

. . . . Another institution which we were not too happy with was < consumerism > : consuming just because goods were there, conspicuous consumption to keep up with others, living just to consume. The antidote to this we proposed was living more simply, getting back to basics, which eventually led to attempts at being self-sufficient along the lines suggested by the Whole Earth Catalog.

Again, there was another level to this, and that was getting past the "should"s of polite society (i.e., the Protestant work ethic). In our search for ways to simplify our lives, we also tried not doing things, just to find out if they were really necessary: not cleaning your apartment to see when you really needed/wanted to do it; not speaking for months; not eating meat; not shaving your legs; trying letting things go, letting "it all hang out". We wanted to be sure there were "no ghosts by our side", as Dylan put it; no hidden, unspoken rules we were following blindly. The communities we created were often "safe spaces" where almost anything was allowed (except harming others) and you could do what you needed to do to get in touch with yourself and learn to grasp and enjoy life on your own terms.

We were also reacting to the artificiality of the machine/industrial age, with a new search for natural beauty, and a rebirth of crafts. The principles of the Arts and Crafts Movement were remembered: the practical can also be art. Like the saying in Bali,"We have no art. We just do everything the very best that we can," we were doing life as art (as in zen). We were trying for living raised to its highest expression and no less.

Finally, as another aspect of the disappointment with the consumer society, the sixties were coincident with (or perhaps even the result of) a major change in thinking: that there are limits to what humans can do or even know, that technology and progress and science may not be able to solve everything. We were, after all, the first generation to grow up with the reality of the atom bomb.

And this led to an entirely new strand in the bohemian credo, one never seen so strongly in any alternative western train of thought, not in the marxists, not in the beatnicks: a spiritual connection to nature, born some say of the experience of sending the first man to the moon; others say an inevitable result of the end of the frontier, of endless resources and a to-be-raped earth, a realization of the world getting smaller. McLuhan would add the further theory that new means of communication (the hippies were part of the first generation to have tv and a telephone in nearly every home) were at the root of it all.

Native Americans look back to Chief Luther Standing Bear who wrote, in his autobiography (1933) that when enough generations were born and died on American soil, it would finally become home. Wherever it came from, it was a recognition of the interdependence of all creatures which came to more clear public view during the environmental movement of the 70s.


A NATION REDISCOVERS ITS POETRY

All in all, we for the first time had the chance to ask "How should I live my life?" And the answers caused a comprehensive change in lifestyle: to more vegetarian cooking, and the use of fresh vegetables and fruits; to owner-built homes, and the creation of architectural fantasies; to bold, colorful (hand-made) clothing, and the end to the tyranny of "styles" (any length, style goes); to the rediscovery of crafts; to changes in the what we did for work (right livelihood: organic farming, etc).; to recycling and alternative energy.

"If I had one thing to tell everybody, it would be: do it now," wrote Paul Krassner, editor of The Realist). "Take up music, read a book, proposition a girl - but do it now. We know we are all sentenced to death. People cannot become prisoners of guilts and fears. They should cling to each moment and take what enjoyment they can from it. I do not mean reckless, hedonistic pleasure. There just should not be a dichotomy between doing and being, spirit and flesh, pleasure and principles, work and play, orgasm and love.

"The anguish always goes on - people starving in Biafra and dying on the battlefields in Vietnam. Sometimes I watch the news and I begin to cry because I feel so bad. I feel sorry for others, and yet I am glad to be alive just to be feeling, sensing, sympathizing, trying to understand." [Life Oct 4, 1968]

Existentialism taught us that we set our own goals and morals. But unlike the Beat generation, which stumbled into this new vacuum completely off-balance, we, from somewhere, realized that we had to follow the advice in Salinger's Franny and Zooey: once you've decided what to do with your life, try your best to do it to perfection. Furthermore, existentialism presented the idea that we have responsibility for what we are. This led to the idea of "doing something with your life" over and above the bread-and-butter struggle. This privilege which few had enjoyed before was also a responsibility that few were bothered with before, only the artists and the heroes. ["I don't know how it all got started, I don't know what they do with their lives" - first time in a (pop) song?]

The driving force was the need to be yourself, coupled with the freedom to be yourself: the heroes of the 60s were people who were all doing themselves, not just their job, who were allowing themselves to follow a greater moral/spiritual call: Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Lenny Bruce, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Daniel Ellsberg, Malcolm X, etc.

This pull to "get involved", be committed, was the earliest public sign of the sixties. Shedding the powerlessness which permeated the fifties was a big task, but we believed in the freedom and democracy of which we had been taught. Not the freedom to harm someone or to cry fire in a crowded theater, just the freedom to sleep when you're tired and eat when you're hungry instead of when a clock tells you to, and to do work that you enjoy doing, and to speak freely about such things. This personal definition of freedom expanded to breaking the borders of tastefulness, expecting yourself and others to do the unexpected.

This trend eventually gave way to what some called the "Me Generation", supposedly concerned in great degree with self-help and betterment, hedonism and pleasure. But the opposite trend also was working, as the personal became political: civil rights, women's rights, ethnic group rights; what you did with your life was also a statement of your political beliefs. It was not enough to sit in your corner and just "do your own thing". What you did had far-reaching implications for which you had to be responsible.

Through this trend, the sixties became an attempt to translate poetry into action. Art walked out of the galleries and into the streets. Mime scenes and drama previously appropriate only for theaters and art galleries took on new life as they entered other areas of life. And instead of audiences sitting quietly and witnessing, audiences rushed to get involved.


THE MEDIUM AND THE MESSAGE

But the question remained how to get to these goals we were envisioning, and for this there were no easy answers. McCarthyism had silenced nearly all dissent in the U.S. during the "silent 50s"; when the children of the bountiful 60s came of age there were few channels for creative change open and operating. Ignorant of the history of American populism or socialism or feminism or labor struggles, it appeared to most of us that whole new approaches to affecting change had to be created from scratch. Thus the big turn-outs at marches and demonstrations, and the desperation. Most of us felt utterly powerless and did not know how to break through to where the power lay, while at the same time, feeling that the way to break out of our aloneness was to "get involved". (It wasn't until the activism of the 70s and 80s that more of us realized that there were things we could do, like attending public hearings, writing letters to the editor, calling our congress person, that occasionally had a real effect.)

Added to this was the fact that there were no initiation rites to say `now you are entering mature/adult life, this is what it will involve, if you decide to go ahead with it, this is what you will be judged by, what will be expected of you' (with its implicit threat: if not, die now). We were caught in the empty time of teenage and young adult osmosis to adulthood; a way station between home and the world, with no firm foot in either.

In modern times, the teen-age period is anyway a time of the incipient awareness of the horrifying emptiness of reality (as Andre Codrescu has been known to mutter), the stage at which you realize the ironic futility of life due to death but have not learned any of the ideologies or techniques (zen, work, love, drugs) that allow you to cope with this realization. Michael Ventura calls it a time of hunger for extremes of experience. But previously alcohol had been the only Dionysian mode available, and alcohol plays in a bittersweet scale, a setting for pleasure attached to pain, allowing you to deal with things you're not supposed to feel good about, like sex or telling someone off.

Marijuana and acid broke the deadlock: acid allowed the questioning of the validity of realism - of values themselves - exploring the way a person's perception alters what is real. Psychedelics allowed seeing reality the way you do when you're doing a painting: the colors of the painting ask for other colors/shapes to be with them; so reality asks for responses from you to make itself real. Acid made you want to live your whole life creatively.

So, commitment. Existence as a positive value in a time of apathy [John Tytell: Naked Angels]. But, perhaps because of coming to it through marijuana and acid, we approached it through joyful protest. In the tradition of Rosa Luxembourg, of whom almost none of us had ever heard, we were not going to join in a revolution that wasn't fun. Because we were feeding on a euphoria that we could create ourselves and our world, and a belief that our being there changed what happened as surely as we were being pulled along by the energy being released.

It also allowed the first opening for expanding ourselves by bringing the mythic back into our lives. Just as our parents' generation reeled from the impact of Freud's analysis (unfortunately sometimes applied as the only explanation of human development), we were the first generation to feel the (more joyful) impact of Jung's. Jung's Man and His Symbols and Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces brought many of us face to face with the dimension of life beyond the obvious, gave us the impetus to search for new ritual, and made us see our lives as bigger than the everyday. Between Jung and psychedelics, it became clear that the inner (in our time more neglected) journey was as important as the outer.

Psychedelics gave us the experience of states of painful rapture, sacred awareness of the universe, (from Joan Halifax's description of the shamanic experience, in The Wounded Healer) as (once again/as usual) Bob Dylan put it so well, "like seeing everything for the first time". It became important to recover a sense of wonder - in everything; to become "again as a child", do things that grown-ups don't have the time to do (like waking up for the sunrise, or leaving a box out for people to recycle clothes in).

It could be said that we re-discovered the wisdom of wildness within and without at the same time.

And an important aspect of this (still growing) was the experience and realization that "things" were alive, not dead; that in a certain way of viewing the world, everything has a soul and a nature, an interdependence with other things. The Native American community had in fact been saying this all along but the sixties was the first time middle Americans "grokked" [fully understood] it.

In fact, in many ways, we began to see a way for, as Dylan put it, "runnin' down an older road - one that doesn't force nature to be unnatural".

We began the practice of thinking large, asking annoying questions like `If this is supposed to be harmless, how come people get sick so much?', that developed into the habit of "living simply, thinking complicated."


THE FADING OF THE DREAM: THE SEVENTIES AND EIGHTIES

When the media began to announce the death of the sixties in the late seventies I never believed them, living as I was a hippie-activist lifestyle in daily contact with other hippie-activists. But I must admit it made me a bit uncomfortable. However, researching the sixties has led me to the discovery of a surprising trend: the fact is that the media have periodically been announcing the end to idealism and the return of apathy and mefirstism for quite some time - before the sixties, during the sixties, right after the sixties, and on. [Newsweek, June 13, 1960: the apathy of students; Saturday Evening Post, December 29-30, 1961: "Youth: The Good Generation"; Time, January 29, 1965: a generation of conformists; Life, May 19, 1967: "Who Says College Kids Have Changed? At Indiana University, the students' main concern is looking out for No. 1"; Life, February 4, 1972: "Today's high school generation is interested in security, stability, and comfort." (The only real exception was George Leonard's daring statement in Look, December 20, 1960: "The Explosive Generation".)] "Activists are back in the minority," the radio bleats - but the truth is there never was an activist majority in the sixties (in fact, I wonder if there ever has been in any period of change - from the French revolution and the American revolution, through the Russian revolution, and the U.S. in the thirties). There was always - even in 1968-72 when the media made the activists the most visible and when even your formerly ultra-straight roommate was smoking grass and learning about zen and tie-dying her clothes - a dedicated, hard-working visionary minority and a large mass of confused but well-meaning on-lookers who joined in only when they felt really enraged, when they felt it was safe to do so, or when it seemed to be what everybody else they felt good about was doing. However, the large mass of on-lookers by the late sixties had been brought to a point of awareness of the issues by the actions of the active minority that they did not stand in the way of the minority. These days are not much different in many areas of activism. Peace groups, environmental groups, social change groups are still quietly going on, cementing small gains into place, working with individuals, and building small bridges, as the larger society worries publicly about the state of things.

But, at any rate, energy like that released in the sixties probably can't last for too long in one community, anyway; the intensity implodes inward - things start moving so fast that there is only the energy, no stability, no tradition, vacillating ground rules. V.d., bummers, rip-offs, busts wore down the strong feelings of community. People moved off, people died. But the energy did not die; it dispersed throughout the country and eventually the world, and colored history for the next decade or longer. The mid- to late-seventies were a second wave: the sixties spread out, diffused, sent out ripples. On a trip to Turkey, for example, in 1978, I met young people who had set up a psychedelically-decorated room in the basement of their house, where they invited us wistfully, hoping that we would join them in the experiences of freedom and exhilaration that they had missed.

But back in the U.S., in the end, the Vietnam War used up the GNP surplus, and we were back to hard times by the late 70s and early 80s: jobs and housing became hard to find again, the cost of living rose, and the dollar kept dropping. It was a step back towards the basics of survival.

And, the war brought on an exhaustion in another way. The continuous fight against the war used up our resources, our cheerfulness, our buoyancy, our fun with experimentation. It didn't seem like that at the time: fighting against the war went hand in hand with the loving world we envisioned - after all, to be for love was to be against war. But to have the war drag on and on for more then ten years (World War II lasted less then four) with teach-ins and marches and demonstrations year after year really sapped our once-youthful energies. Meanwhile, the rise of factbabble infotainment/information overload made us unsure what to believe in.

As in the Tower of Babel story, differences emerged: there were many causes, many roads; each picked what was most important to them to put their energies into. For the first time, frustrations with the system became consciously or unconsciously dealt with by deciding that living well was the best revenge whether it meant living within the system or not.

We were blind again; it became harder to recognize each other. Yet the changes and the process of change never died. After a period of major realizations like the sixties, society needs time - a good bit of time - to incorporate them and make them manifest. In fact, there are more activists working now than there ever were: Nader's Raiders, Earth First!, the Nuclear Freeze campaign, Common Cause, Earth Stewards Network, and thousands of other less nationally-well known groups are working less visibly and often more effectively on the multitude of small component parts that are needed to bring about the fundamental changes which were envisioned earlier.

Some cite the "Yuppie" phenomenon as evidence that the hippies are dead. This media creation is supposed to include all the members of the middle class who hold upwardly mobile jobs, have large incomes which they invest or use to unknowingly set the trends which the rest of us can only react to, such as supporting expensive restaurants or clothing stores. (As widely touted as it is, it is only a media creation, because in actuality average middle class buying power has been going steadily downward since its all time high in 1973.)

I believe instead that westward-migrating Americans have finally gotten again to the point where we can settle in and live as Europeans do: on fresh, varied food; in well-made homes and clothing; using well-crafted objects. Garnishing life. Of course, when we want these things, it's considered luxury, silly, absurd, unnecessary, even snobbery, since we have easy access to grocery stores and mass-produced goods. But we've discovered that we liked Main Street as much as or more than Tomorrowland: fresh produce, beautiful architecture, gardens, soda fountains, lampposts, adventure (safe, that is), and fantasy.

I see the roots of the developments of the 1980s in the sixties:

- black power and consciousness movements have given way to the growth of the black middle class and the first movements of blacks into politics (the first black mayors, legislators, etc, since reconstruction);

- similar movements among other ethnic groups have given way to a new unity among Native Americans, Chicanos, asians;

- the greater understanding of the values of whole foods diet has given way to a more widespread interest in and acceptance of organic and healthy foods (recently powerfully re-established with the development of an organic monitoring and certificating program), and the use of fresher foods, and an appreciation of ethnic cuisines (i.e. Thai) and previously unknown ingredients (i.e. garlic), and the development of small specialized grocery and food stores; - outfits put together from thrift shop findings, fanciful clothing borrowed from many historic and ethnic influences, and the permission that anything goes has led to eclecticism in fashion, an interest in handmade clothing, pieced fabric designs, the end of the reign of the fashion-makers;

- communes and the appreciation and restoring of older housing (i.e. Victorians) has given way to experiments in more innovative architecture, influenced by the way Japanese design incorporates the landscape, more involvement in housing by owner-builders, the advocacy of community-centered clustered housing [NYT June 28, 1987], and of human-centered city design;

- experiments with alternative medical systems and a generally more wholistic view of human health has led to acceptance of alternate health systems (i.e. acupuncture, bio-feedback) and of alternative methods of childbirth, a greater understanding of the value of yoga and exercise, and a move toward learning to feel good without alcohol and cigarettes;

- encounter groups and an acceptance of a wider range of aberrant behavior have led to a whole array of new methods of wholistic therapy, and of more sophisticated support for someone who is individuating or mid-life crisising;

- the search for right livelihood and the preference toward small responsible businesses continues, along with the wholistic realization that even the best work in the world (even those of artists and activists) can get tiring or boring, and that everyone needs some variety in their life, and this has led to people having several careers in their life, and increasing interest in lifelong learning;

- the distrust of over-specialization has led to more people gathering their own information, questioning authority, and taking part in the decisions that impact their lives, including civic, environmental, medical, and consumer (i.e. more informed consumerism and ethnical investing);

- a burst of feminism has given way to the renewed movement of women into male-dominated professions and a greater awareness of how sexual biases influence our thinking and the importance of members of both sexes being able to participate in the decisions made about their lives and in the society in general;

- recycling, reforestation and experiments with alternative energy have given way to a vastly greater and more widely held understanding of environmental values and wish to act on them, a hesitation to plunge ahead with new technology such as nuclear reactors and genetic engineering, and the application to questions of a new post-existentialist yardstick, which is that, to some degree, nature must have some determination over morality;

- the folk-music culture and movements to bring about greater rights for and appreciation of ethnic groups has led to a growing rediscovery of ethnic roots and traditions (i.e. world music, ethnic art), as well as a wider understanding of the inter-relationship between U.S. foreign policy and the problems of third world countries;

- and finally, there is the still-continuing development of styles of dancing that you don't have to take classes to learn; craftsmanship; independent, personal cinema; alternative schools; co-ed living in dorms; living together before marriage; travels and taking a year off between high school and college.

To me, many of the cultural developments of the eighties are still based on the sixties idea of life raised to its highest expression. Before the sixties, everything humans created by artifice ( = art) seemed to be dishonest/phony/not real and therfore ugly and suspect. Now, more and more, we act on the belief that as long as art/artifice has honesty and life-promoting values behind it, it's just the world being continually reborn, just all of us dancing for each other.

And we finally have an answer to John Maynard Keynes' argument that "in the long run, we are all dead". Now we can say, with the Native Americans who plan ahead seven generations, that "in the long run, our children will be alive".


ALMOST TIME: THE NINETIES

Kurt Andersen has argued in Rolling Stone (May 18, 1989) that what the rebellion of the sixties succeeded at most was not so much discrediting the various orthodoxies it took on (religion, music, sex, race, work, politics, foreign policy), but "most thoroughly at displacing the idea of orthodoxy itself, of easy moral consensus and clarity. Americans now come equipped with a snickery skepticism that runs as deep as the hopeful stoicism of the '40s."

But more than that, what the sixties gave us, which we have not yet fully used up, is a vision of the future and of what we want to become. A window opened and a significant portion of the population could see, at least vaguely, into the future. Although that window eventually became clouded over with desperation about the world situation; the reaction of the fundamentalists, colonialists, and traditionalists; and hubris born of lower energy prices, many of us still carry the vision, experiment with getting nearer to it, nurse it, try to live it. It was a vision of people living in harmony with each other and with nature, with a spiritual life as important as the material. And the sixties got us past depression era and cold war fears enough to allow us to try new things.

Because of this vision, Americans have to some degree been able to move in countervailing force to some of the waves swirling around them; at least to a greater degree than citizens of some other countries. On a trip to the Republic of Ireland, for example, I encountered a great uncertainty about where the country is going, based on centuries of colonial rule, which has led to a near-standstill in pro-active movement toward what people want. In the USSR, as another example, the country rode until just recently on apparently outmoded past visions based on industrialization for material wealth, which left little room for other values that some sensed needed to be developed.

(I think an important part of this re-envisioning is the seemingly contradictory act of looking back to find one's roots, a discipline growing continuously in popularity. This looking back, either through geneology, travels to the lands of one's forebears, or rediscovery of ethnic music and art, is an important part of re-seeding ourselves as a link in the seven generations for which we are learning to plan. Looking back goes hand in hand with looking into the future, as opposed to our parents' and culture's view of being "the first modern generation". To encourage the musicians to come, we must celebrate the fiddlers of the past; to ensure the forests to come, the healers to come, and so on, all a part of perpetuating the leaders, the daring, the healing, the wisdom, the magic.)

In this country, and in others influenced by the vision of the sixties (Germany, France, Holland, at least) people continue to inform themselves and to act, whether it be sitting down in front of toxic dump trucks or writing letters about the problems with a dam project, or developing alternative communities, or just participating in the decisions about their children's education or their health care. In fact, I would say that, the way you can tell a "sixties person" these days is that, in the face of what appears to be the impossibility of the task, they DO.

But some problems also continue. We are still dealing with a problem not solved fully in the sixties: too much dependence on heros (Huey Newton, Timothy Leary, the Chicago Seven, etc) - which grew out of the respect we were taught for individualism. True (participatory) democracy is tedious. In the 80s, we are slowly having to learn that life is a compromise worked out slowly at a conference table in a room full of babbling voices.

And we also have to finally deal with the yet-unresolved harder question of how to convince the unconverted, or, failing that, how to live together with each other in the long-term. After all, you rarely really change people's minds about fundamental things; you just put out your ideas and wait until the next generation, educated with those ideas around them, accepts them as obvious.

The task of reinvisioning, answering the question "What shall we become?", is gigantic. And there probably never will be a resting place for the bohemians/gypsies; in the U.S., unless Swedish or Dutch socialism somehow becomes accepted, we'll always be struggling, fermenting, fomenting.

In the meantime, people become tired/confused/moved to inaction by the doom and gloom they see in the media. To get people involved and active, the need is still for joy (i.e. information on species being saved rather than on just species that are endangered; and pro-active bridges to the third world, rather than just information on how many people are starving).

When we feel frustrated and helpless, it's usually because we can no longer feel the community around us. We long for something to energize and sustain us in the uphill battle to carry out the vision. It's hard enough to stay joyous and childlike and loose in later life, with all the social demands within which we become entangled, without trying to work for change as well. The question for now is how to keep individual energies going, without the support of the larger culture.

I first ended this, in early 1989, by writing: My guess is that the next ripple of change will come back to us from Europe. Europe is stronger now; it was held back at first by tradition, history, and class structure, while the U.S. moved ahead in innovation, because it was fresher, not cramped by tradition. By the 80s, it is the US instead that is being held back by its two-party winner-take-all political system, while Europe, with its stronger feeling of community, its longer experience of working things out, and its parliamentary system, now has the Greens and the successful community experiments (Mondragon, Bordeaux banning cars from its central city) and the new ideas.

And now in the early nineties it's surely happening: the Greens and the developments in Eastern Europe, as well as Europe's greater experience with "living together", muddling along, working out compromises, are putting Europe at the front of change. We are looking to Western Europe now for models, and we will probably be looking to Eastern Europe soon, as they take on the challenges that await them.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., when the energies of innovation and playfulness and the awareness of community does return, finally sparked by some series of events or another, new metaphors will be needed to talk about the same things, because the metaphors wear out, even though the subjects don't, and so the ideas will take on new clothing once again.

The next time we won't need to break out of the same boxes as was necessary in the fifties. Sex, communism, and obscenity are not the powerful taboos they once were. Corporations, especially the new mega-breed of multi-nationals, may be the new taboo. As the economy shifts to the providing of services, the commoditization of workers' feelings will probably become important. Stress levels, work, lack of time, dealing with large amounts of information, will be the new material for comedians.

For one thing, the changes brought about by what Alvin Toffler has called the "third wave" of technology will be a significant part of the nature of life. More decentralized work will put us out of touch with co-workers, but also free us to associate more with people outside of work. Ever growing amounts of information will make it harder to do without specialization, at the same time specialized information becomes more generally available. The growing access to and availability of video and computer-driven multimedia will allow more people to record their brains onto tape, but at the same time threaten to even more replace interactive life with the passiveness of being a spectator, as the French Situationist movement predicted. More individualization in tastes and interests will make it harder to find other members to be part of your community, at the same time that ever more specialized interest groups form affiliations.

Perhaps sixties culture will return in whole new types of community associations, already exemplified by the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (the WELL) where people log on at any time to exchange information or just gossip and hang out with others of like interests. Perhaps more people will have enough access to media to make individual statements in films and videos, as Ingmar Bergman and Easy Rider did in the sixties, and as Werner Herzog, Woody Allen, and Spike Lee are doing now. Two movies about honesty (My Dinner With Andre and Sex, Lies, and Videotape) seem to point hopefully in that direction. Perhaps the computer's ability to handle large amounts of information will allow more "Davids" like Amory Lovins (Soft Energy Paths) and Randal O'Toole (Reforming the Forest Service) to take on Goliaths like the energy or lumber industries.

And this time around, we'll know better what to do, how to effect the influences on us. Like the one-time draft-resister who currently works with young people in a service organization, who is ready on a day's notice to set up a draft-counseling center for them. Or the multitudes who attend public hearings, scrutinize E.I.R.s and proposed legislation, write letters, and join organizations. Or the many who have been educated in environmental and other community service-oriented fields. And those who have visited Cuba, Nicaragua, the USSR, China. And those who have gotten themselves elected to office.

Not that this will be without its ironies. I was on my way to a Park District meeting one afternoon recently to testify about over-grazing or restoration of native plants. My path took me down the street near downtown Oakland that becomes the center of the Dead Head encampment each time that group plays there. Passing the painted buses with long-hairs strumming guitars and smoking grass was a strange experience, dressed as I was at the moment in a business-type skirt, blouse, nylons, and shoes to fit in at the hearing, my briefcase by my side. Yet I felt a strong kinship to those in the encampment, whose goals are the same, although they have not found other ways to come close to them.

At a meeting of the local board of the League of Conservation Voters, which I am on, during a discussion of the intricacies of candidate endorsement and campaign financing, one of the women hugged her new baby and, pointing to the group, said, "You know who these people are? They're your friends. They're druids, tree-huggers . . ." And we were, all of us in that room, though we looked like a straight-laced committee, in our professional clothes, and the immediate work we were doing might seem far-removed from the street demonstrations we had attended in the past. The working out of a goal can get pretty rarefied and removed from the initial excitement of conceptualizing it.

Long, circuitous career paths have made the hippies of the 60s take longer than other generational leaders to reach their niches. But in the 1990s, the hippies of the 60s should finally be able to move into positions of power. Although as persons we may be invisible, the ideas we have carried with us will become ever more visible. And our children will be the college students and teens and subteens.

After the excesses of the eighties, there will be some level of an economic downturn, and the thought of another serious recession, this time with even less of the population close to the land and unable to provide basic subsistence for themselves, is a sad one. But, even in bad times, some changes in how the world and national situations are handled are inevitable. For example, win/lose notions like arms "control" may well be replaced with Aikido patterns of negotiating so that all win, as is currently going on in various defense industry conversion projects. We had previously followed western either/or, us/them, good/bad categorizations to their final logical conclusion and hit stone walls. There is no other way to go than to incorporate thought from the east - the positive and the negative. And that is the only way to go into the future. We can't go back.

We are also moving toward an acceptance of a multiversity of ways to view the world, among disciplines (religious, scientific), among ideologies (right, left), and also among groups of people (including tribal/third world). The idea that truth is relative, that customs may be evaluated differently by different cultures (i.e. when nudity is acceptable), or by different disciplines (i.e. religion as an opiate of the people, a part of traditional patriotism, or a psychological aid to interact with the mythic) is becoming an ever stronger new strain of thought.

The next wave of community-building will recognize connections between cultures much more than at any previous time: the value of indigenous societies, east-west interchange, ethnic subcultures. And the new wave will be internationally suave - aware of the latest goings on in Czechoslovakia or Lake Baikal, Brixton, Nepal, the Black Hills, or remote islands of the Pacific - or for that matter, the heart of Brooklyn, Oakland, and East L.A.

The new community-building will go on around the edges of more established entities. Local, bioregionally-specific organizations will reach out to help each other without even attempting to wade through either of their government's bureaucracies. Ties will develop which ignore national boundaries, as in one watershed helping another. It's already starting: German environmentalists, dissatisfied with BASF's Rhine River pollution contacted BASF employees in the southern U.S. to help them in their fight. A crippled craftsman in Berkeley builds wheel-chairs for Nicaraguans. Earthstewards visit and bring back citizen-diplomats from the USSR.

Just as in 1960-65, before the media discovered us, we will each have to find our own paths. Do what you know how to do, as John Stockwell advises.

Some still-unsolved mysteries will be back. We still await the opening of the JFK murder files, but even without those, the true relationship of the CIA to U.S. politics is begging to be disclosed. Here is a job for the nineties. And the mystery is still unsolved as to whether the experiences described by Castaneda are fictional or not. Many more of us need to make those trips and report back. And as to building community, I would like to hear more directly from the Amish and other groups which have made their alternative communities really work. I hope we have a resurgence of the best of regionalism: local differences in cooking, clothing, customs, architecture, that make it interesting to travel, and provide choices in ways to live.

What we need to work toward is: creating closed systems that work (i.e. recycling, sustainable economics and agriculture); making the media responsive; forcing technology to be used wisely (rebuilding infrastructure, avoiding use of pesticides, making tomatoes taste like tomatoes again); changing government to be more representative; bringing life back to rural areas; keeping investment in the communities that need it to go to low-income housing and other social needs; respecting the value of ethno-diversity; and taking the anxiety out of no longer knowing what's safe to eat, wear, touch, etc.

It seems to me that next time, our goal should be: No Bummers. Demonstrations with specific proposals and a proper backup of lobbyists, letter-writers, and well-prepared educational materials; no messy street fights; no naivete about infiltrators; no freaks ripping off other freaks; no getting high on substitutes. Only the best. What a goal: Life without drugs, masks/props, or illusions (except when these are fun). And next time everyone will have to take responsibility, hold up their part of the sky. But not responsibility for speaking out against things . . . this time it should be responsibility for making the world heaven for ourselves and everyone else.

The texture of the times to come is already unfolding. The music (rock and roll) has been around for thirty or so years now. You can see it more and more in people's bodies - the looseness, the inner rhythms, more and more men who can dance. We've broken through to being able to be "alone in public" (as in crowded Japan), uninhibited jogging down the street, walking and talking and dressing as we feel like. We are learning (slowly) that there is a different proper time for things, as in India with ragas: rock music is wonderful for dancing and getting energized, mellow mystical music for concentration and relaxing after stress, getting stoned, even working. The collages and montages that blossomed in the sixties with the Beatles slipping subliminal messages into the music are present in television, and creeping into movies and advertising as we learn to deal with murkiness. And artists have learned to almost download their brains onto the screen, with movies that that put their nightmares, dreams, and visions into visual form (Alphavilla, Blade Runner, Brazil).

I would like us to be able to rediscover Thoreau's prescription that we should experience something new each day, that each day should be made of patterns of organic weavings, one thing leading to the next until something arrives to interrupt. To break away from the need for schedules and set work hours, and move more to fluidity. And to keep open alternatives for how to behave, like businessmen riding bicycles to work - playing the hole for its cracks.

Of great importance will be the ability to have fun, even in bad times.

But the eighties and early nineties is a time of appearances and facades: the punks, the "re" decade, the "irony epidemic", post-modernism, deconstrucivism, the disposable pop culture. Maybe this is because we know what we'd like to change, but we don't have the individual courage and incentive to do it, nor the community context in which to work. A chicken-and-egg situation.

Homelessness is creeping in as an overwhelming condition: homelessness on the streets, but also homelessness as a spiritual condition. The existentialists recognized our loss of future (Satre's? Waiting for Godot, for example). Now we recognize our lack of present, and the pathology in our "continous present', our lack of history and high context (communally-shared assumptions and understandings) (to paraphrase Fritjof Capra). Modernity is no longer a comfortable reality.

Walking through the Haight recently, my visual survey turned up probably about as many "hippies" as were there in September of 1965 when Michael Fallon used the term in the San Francisco Examiner in an article about the Blue Unicorn coffeehouse where the LEMAR (Legalize Marijuana) and the Sexual Freedom League met, and sounded the call which brought so much attention to the subculture. The subculture (and all its waves) is certainly no more alive or dead than it was then. (What's going on in the Haight and other centers right now, as you read this? What are they working on? Of course, the media is not covering it. Perhaps we'll be reading about it in another 25 years.)

But first have come the children of the children of the 50s: radioactive [mutant] teenage ninja [fighting turtles/rats] hamsters in 3D . . . full of sound and fury and signifying nothing. The punks seem to me to be a combination of the negativity of the fifties with the ambivalence of gay culture, reminiscent of the greased-up teens of the fifties with their constant worries about how they looked, thoroughly urbanized with no attempts to be in tune with the earth's harmonies. In the sixties, experiences with acid led to explorations of weird effects in music, movies, even fiction. Punk culture seems to prefer weirdness for the sake of experiencing weird (i.e. footsteps with no echo, scenes without sound or in slow motion) but these don't have the mythic depth to them that other experiences of non-ordinary reality (i.e. shamanism) have; no meaning is implied. In fact, meaninglessness is relished.

Where this post-modern post-mortem will lead to is yet uncertain, but the differences are interesting. The sixties world view incorporated notions of specialness with unity/oneness whereas the punk and post-modern world view has a blase / I've seen it all tone, but recognizes value in manyness, and both have a continuing respect for uncertainties.

"We are living in very strange times and they are likely to get a lot stranger before we bottom out," wrote Hunter S. Thompson recently and this aptly describes these phenomena to me.

Sartre in his No Exit suggested that hell might be other people, and the punks seem convinced of this. But the sixties taught us that heaven is other people, interacting as a wonderful fluid magical group. Unfortunately for the present, this is a mystery which cannot be explained to the uninitiated, but has to be experienced. But if you cried when you saw Bergman's Cries and Whispers, you should know what it is. It's the mystery of a community of love and relationship: a delicate conspiracy indeed.


THE 1990s (a poem)

Here come our children
the ones we gave birth to druglessly and fraught with ecstasy
and carefully nursed on breast milk
who grew up on communes eating brown rice and soy milk
who learned to read at home with hand-dipped candles
who we tried to teach to do nothing which is not an act of beauty
the first of the seven generations
for whom we are saving the world
the first generation on American soil
to have the world so sanctified for it.
We who may be too jaded to naively join
in a body of love to each other,
yet are inextricably tied in boundless love to these
to whom we dedicated our actions,
we who gave them life and tried to heal the earth for them,
perhaps watching them come of age will now return life to us.