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When I was a small child, I lived in Northern California, San Jose to be exact. It was the early seventies and many of my dad's friends were hippies. We traveled to Santa Cruz and Big Sur and generally had a great time. I remember being surrounded by gentle, laughing people with big hearts who had a lot of tolerance for a often aggravating young boy with a big mouth.
I remember a few of these people with great fondness, though my father has long since lost contact with all of them. I remember the guy who turned me on to the Moody Blues, who bore the nickname "Pelican," and had a big white dog named "Mouse." I remember a woman who shares the same last name as a certain political celebrity who takes a lot of heat here on DU these days, who always called me "Missile Man" because of an announcement I'd made at the tender age of 4 or 5 while frolicking in her apartment pool.
I barely remember going to Stanford to play among the hippies and such folks listening to such bands as Country Joe and the Fish, BB King, Big Brother and the Holding Company (sans Janis, unfortunately), Jefferson Airplane, and so many others I don't recall.
My dad and step mom finally grew tired of the city and moved North, to Central Oregon, where we had a small ranch and a garden and I learned the value of self-sustaining farming, canning, and animal husbandry. My old man had big dreams about leaving the grid, building a windmill, and selling power back to the power companies. But he never did it.
They taught me about conservation, about respecting the environment, and about honoring the creatures we sacrificed to feed ourselves. My step mom made her own candles, and they made their own wine. They lived off the land as much as they could, and my dad built his own drywall business.
When I was thirteen all of that ended. My step mom, who'd been dad's secretary, hadn't made sure she'd been getting receipts from payments to his supplier, and the guy started trying to double-bill my dad. His business went under and they split up.
We moved North again, returning to the Puget Sound region where he'd grown up. I became something of a wild child and a trial for my father. I had his wanderlust, and his hunger for new horizons, and I wasn't easily tamed. I'd been ruined at an early age--I believed that there was always something better waiting over that next hill.
I didn't have the same soft spirit as the hippies I knew as a child, any more than my father did. He had a lot of hippies as friends, but he'd always been a different kind of rebel, someone who wanted to live off the grid, or, at least, be constrained as little as possible by social expectations. It made him a difficult person to be around at times and only time has mellowed him since.
But I remember the things I learned from these people, even if some of them later abandoned their ideals. I learned a lot about acceptance, and about believing in peace, and that happiness and joy came from within more than it came from outside oneself.
When I see the young people of today bashing the hippies, it makes me want to laugh and cry at the same time. When they stood up and threw off the yoke of authoritarianism, materialism, and traditional roles, it was a watershed moment for our society, and one that should never have been forgotten as easily as it was. By the time I became an adult, too many of them became conformists, turning into versions of the people they'd rebelled against in their own youth. They became parents, and fell into the trap of believing that authority should be obeyed, or at least respected more often than not. That to get along one had to go along. Too many forgot how to question authority.
My generation was the last one that had true freedom of expression in the schools. We were allowed to wear tee-shirts advertising beer, or featuring scandalous sayings. We could be stoners out in the open, deliberately mangle the Pledge of Allegiance, mock authority, bad-mouth the President, and act stupid to our heart's content.
What we didn't do was shoot one another. The occasional fist-fight might erupt, but I seriously doubt anyone ever seriously contemplated shooting up their school. And all the while the Moral Majority was telling us how terrible our Heavy Metal music was. We were long haired freaks and we liked it that way.
I've gone to schools in big cities, and tiny towns. I've stood at the edge of the woods and howled back at coyotes, watching them slink like shadows from tree to tree, eyes shining in the moonlight. I spent half a year traveling with a fly-by-night carnival in California. I've done everything from construction to retail sales, slept under bridges and hitchhiked my way up and down the west coast several different times. I've woken up in the middle of the night to find that a family of skunks had decided to keep me company in my sleep.
I've sat under the eucalyptus trees in Golden Gate park and marveled at the way the shifting leaves made patterns against the night sky, and drank beer with Native Americans in a run-down house covered in graffiti. I've danced naked under the stars with witches, sang hymns in church with holy rollers. I've packed up on the spur of the moment and caught a Greyhound bus to the East Coast and stood on the lawns of buildings over two hundred years old, marveling at the sense of history it invoked in me.
I've balled up my fists and fought to protect myself, and others I cared about. I've walked in places where my heart beat like a hammer against my chest, and stood in dark, crumbling tenements while the stench of crack filled the air. I've bathed in rivers, played tag with a trio of young weasels, and stood twenty feet from a doe and fawn bathed in the glow of dusk.
I've walked with rangers, and buddhist monks, and drank tequila with Hell's Angels. And I've done all these things without ever leaving the United States, but for one weekend I spent in Vancouver, BC with my best friend.
I've seen kindness and cruelty, watched friends tormented by drugs, and seen others rise above their limitations. I've seen some of my dreams fulfilled, and others fade like morning mist. I've loved, and lost, and learned to love again. I've had the most precious things in my life taken from me and been broken on the rack of anguish and anger. But I've seen that loss redeemed, and had the chance to make up some of the time I'd lost. I've had one of my greatest loves become my greatest enemy, and then discovered anew the friendship that we'd shared before we'd ever fallen in love.
This is a wondrous world filled with wondrous people. As I sit here in this early morning, thinking about finding my bed, I know that for all our darkness, there is also a bright light that burns deep within every human heart. We are each and every one of us a miracle aborning, for we can achieve amazing things, and discover within ourselves a strength and purity of purpose that we might never imagine ahead of time.
Some of my earliest memories are of people who lived and breathed the notion of hope, and that hope, love, and faith in humanity could shake the foundations of the world. In one sense, it seems, they were wrong. In another, they were right. Because here, on the edge of one of the darkest times in human history, I do not feel despair.
I'm roughly halfway through my life, forty years of love, loss, wonder, and discovery. The next ten may see a shattering of everything I've ever known, or it may bring us a future beyond our wildest imagining.
The Chinese reportedly have a curse: "May you live in interesting times."
In that sense, we're all cursed. But, when you get right down to it, in that respect, all of mankind has been cursed since our earliest days. For we are an interesting creature, we humans. Both savage and sublime, hateful and loving, wise and full of mischief.
Some people think hope and optimism is little more than naivete. :shrug: Well, I'll take naivete over a heart full of doom any day.
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