Hip(pies)

My parents were nerds.

They listened to classical music. They worked hard, dressed well, and bathed regularly.
They believed in rules and decorum and hard work.

Worst of all, they loved America. My mother you can forgive. Being one of those old fashioned immigrants who came here because she considered it philosophically superior to the South Africa of her youth. So she's unfashionable--but anyone raised under Apartheid gets a pass. No such luck for my dad, who studied political science, served in the Air Force during Vietnam, and still stood there in short hair and shoes saying what a great place this is. Once he even tried to tell me that Leave it to Beaver was an accurate portrayal of life in the fifties.

So I missed the whole hippy thing. Having no point of reference, I simply thought of them as the loud, dirty people who complained more than they contributed. Don't blame my folks; they didn't indoctrinate me. Really. It was a conclusion I drew as a young boy with budding OCD symptoms who did well in school and liked things like order and hygiene.
But don't get the idea that they were any help, either. My parents made no attempt whatsoever to let me in on the whole hippy thing. They never said "man," never did drugs, never even wore real bell bottom trousers.
My dad took us to a protest once, but it was a protest against the state raising income taxes. He was wearing a suit and tie. Even though we got to miss school that day, it was clear we were not there to buck the establishment. All the way to the protest he talked about the founding fathers and the constitution. It felt more like school than school. And even if he had been wearing Birkenstocks and a tie-dyed serape, his chants of "That government governs best which governs least!" would have given him away.
Come to think of it, Mom was no help at all, even with the Apartheid thing. As the world was teaching me that my maternal homeland was the greatest evil since Hitler, she unthinkably found positive things to say about South Africa, and would never let anyone who hadn't lived there bad mouth the place. Despite all her political disagreements, she still had this weird thing about respecting one's birthplace. And when it had become sufficiently disagreeable, she had found a more compatible place and moved. Even in that place that was so ripe for revolution and protest, she never carried a sign, never marched on the capital, never put off showering until people saw the light. She just came to a place where, according to her, "people are free to achieve their potential no matter what color they are." By the time I was old enough to understand how elegantly misinformed she was, it was too late. I'd missed the boat.

In subsequent years, I grew to hate the whole hippy thing. First I told myself it was aesthetic. I just wasn't favorably inclined to gaudy oranges and greasy, unwashed hair. I told myself that women with shaved legs and armpits were more attractive. I valued deodorant. When ZZ-Top said "Every girl's crazy 'bout a sharp dressed man," I took it as a personal vindication of my hopelessly fashionable, cutting-edge-but-still-clean-cut visual philosophy.
But it went beyond clothes and razors. As years passed, even as I thought I was adopting an easy going, open minded "the sun rises on us all with equal splendor" approach, I found my own voice--and found myself wanting to raise it loud and say "Shut the hell up!" to hippies and what I came to refer to as "their ilk." I hated their air of moral superiority, their almost constant doomsday prophesying, the way they seemed to think they owned social consciousness. When their lack of religion became their religion, it seemed to me a delicious indictment of their snobbism. I felt shameful joy whenever their lifestyle turned against them in the form of drug overdoses, or sexually transmitted diseases, or serial divorces. I felt myself giving into rage when people I unfairly associated with hippies complained about anything at all. "Make a contribution other than the complaint," I'd say, "and maybe someone will listen to you." When Astronomers debunked the psuedo-religion of astrology as an abjectly ridiculous fiction, and informed the world that, even if it did have some kind of mystical effect on the inhabitants of planet Earth, the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius remains, in fact, more than 500 years away, I smiled with exactly one side of my face and said, "go get 'em, tiger."

Then one day I was eating a Ben and Jerry's Peace Pop. A co-worker commented on how delicious it looked, and I actually opened my mouth and said "Yeah, isn't it great the way they exploit the idea of 'Peace' to sell ice-cream?"
Not "Yes, it is delicious; you should try one." Not, "I'd share it with you if you weren't so germ-phobic." Not even "Ah yes, the ultimate in post modern convenience: the fattening phallus." There I was with opportunities all around me for kindness and/or comedy, and instead I was making an impotent political diatribe. It was the end: I had become what I despised. Weeks later as I laid my soul bear to a friend, he put the cap on it. "Why hate?" he said, "The extravagancies of the hippies lead indirectly to a lot of positives in our society."
You're so right, I thought, then told myself: It's my parents' fault. I was raised wrong.

But we all have to reach that point where our parents' blame ends and our personal responsibility begins. I have to accept the possibility that a good deal of the bitterness I felt towards my parents for being nerdy and un-hip has been transferred to the movement, lifestyle, and philosophy they unwittingly hid from my understanding. A new day has to dawn, one in which I let go of my gut level revulsion, and simply let the hippies be.

Don't get me wrong, I'm still going to wish that the guy with the "Fund Schools, Not Wars!" bumper sticker who walks right by the school bake sale without buying so much as a cupcake would drive his car off a cliff. But I can no longer relish this wish. And I can no longer associate such idiocy with the golden era of greasy, long-haired, unkempt, pot smoking, bra-less, dread-locked followers of the Grateful dead, whose caravans passed my parents by.

Inside Out

Stay with me. This isn't going to be pleasant.

Sitting in a local eatery, a friend slyly points out to me the outrageous portions ordered by the outrageously proportioned couple at a nearby table. "Don't stare," he warns as I gawk, a rubber necker at a culinary accident. The couple seems absorbed by the act of eating. Assured they are not on to us, he makes a joke, which I will embellish for my own nefarious purposes:

"I saw them park in the handicapped section when I came in. I guess they wanted to avoid inadvertently burning calories on a lengthy walk back to the car."

Yes, they were fat.

Days past, when faced with such a scene, and such commentary, I would mourn silently in my heart. I would hold it all in until I got home late and wet my pillow with tears of shame. But his comment digs into my skull as the obese pair shovel prosperous American amounts of syrupy pancakes into their mouths, literally gaining weight by the second. Live and let live, I want to say. He might not realize how hurtful his "joke" is. Besides, everyone has a right to their opinion, right?
Wrong. This is not days past. I now wear the pants of social consciousness; and socially conscious people can't simply let others live. A year ago, commenting would have been unthinkable. Now it seems inevitable. So there I am in a crowded local eatery, waitresses buzzing about, fellow citizens blithely strapping on the feedbag, a good friend sitting across from me, chewing his cud of bad ideas.

I can't even wait to finish the mouthful of vegetarian omelet I'm working on. "Do you realize the danger in what you just said? Do you hear yourself?"

My voice is rising. Everybody can hear. My friend shifts a little in his seat.

"FAT PEOPLE, in a HANDICAPPED SPOT? Very funny. But let me tell you something my svelte friend. The day we grant handicapped privileges to fat people is the day civilization as we know it crumbles to the ground!"

My friend gives me the "quiet down" signal. I guess he doesn't want people in a crowded local eatery thinking he wants to bring civilization to its knees. Well, I have knees of my own. And I don't get down on them for anyone. Not anymore.

"No I will not quiet down! Handicapped people deserve a certain amount of special consideration because they are involuntarily physically compromised. What's more, we owe them a debt of gratitude for the noble, courageous spirit that strives within them and inspires us all. But FAT PEOPLE? [here I pause to see if I have their attention] They might be physically compromised, but they are fat on the inside as well. And you can't legislate conscience!"

By now his face reveals an intense desire for me to quiet down. But behind his shallow social anxiety I see a deeper fear. He sees the truth in my words.
He realizes that one of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse is about to ride.

Called Famine in the ancient texts, the name of this particular harbinger of doom can also be translated: "They who eat as though famine was imminent, and those who coddle them into thinking there is absolutely nothing questionable about burdening one's bones with several hundred pounds of gluttony and sloth." (You can see why the translators shortened it.)

As he nervously glances around the establishment, I finish chewing the mouthful I had taken before speaking up, ready at any moment to launch into the biblical implications of his comment.
"Dude," he says at length, "I think they can hear you."

"I hope they can hear me!"

"Well," he says, brushing a cocktail of eggs, mushrooms, bell peppers and cheese from his left shoulder, then his right, "you shouldn't talk with your mouth full."

He still doesn't know what he is saying, but his comment gives me pause. There I was, so anxious to right the wrongs of this world that I didn't even have the common decency to finish chewing before I spoke. The words coming out of my mouth had been utterly lost in the spray of food that should have been inside my mouth. I try to tell myself that staving off the Apocalypse is important enough to allow for certain moral compromises. But I know I'm wrong. I remember another Horseman--one far more dangerous. The one the ancient texts say represents "the bloody mess caused by those whose exterior doesn't match their interior." (Commonly translated as WAR.)

I take a moment to gather my thoughts, which include: The sun rises on others like it rises on you (in some cases, more so). And: No matter what the exterior reveals, you cannot claim to know the heart of someone you haven't spent a good deal of time with. And finally: he who is without sin, let him cast the first egg. I take a swig of water to make sure the oral cavity is clear of debris that might be ejected during my apology. Then I stand up and say--to the world at large as well as the large individuals at the nearby table--

"Please forgive my friend here. He did not mean to imply that you were handicapped in any way, or that there is something wrong with that if you happen to be handicapped in a way that we can't see from here."

As I sit down, my satisfaction at the stunned silence is muted by the fact that I forgot to apologize for my own actions. For a moment I consider standing again and asking everyone involved to forgive the fact that my message was compromised, that my defense of the overweight couple was tainted with a mouthful of food. But by now I've got a mouth full of rye toast, and I've learned my lesson:

The most important thing is to respect people.

Intergalactic Anti-Jingo Bloodsuckers

Activists and Protestors: your time has come.

Days past, you were marginalized--even trivialized. Your genuine concern for the miserable state of the world was taken as your personal quest to make everyone else as miserable as yourself. No longer.

They gave you dismissive titles like "Flower" and "Children." They misinterpreted your odor. They Co-opted your music for advertising. They turned the mechanism of Capitalism against you. They wrote the local paper and jeered your grotesquely enlarged photos of abortions in letters to the editor.

You were relegated to nostalgia.
You became precious.
Your screaming from the legally cordonned "Protest Area" felt muted and sepia toned, like those photos of you in magazine retrospectives. And you were left to wonder, "I used to be so shrill . . ."

You couldn't stop integration. Or illegal immigration. You couldn't rid the world of poverty and war. No matter how loud and long you sounded the alarm, people still ate whatever they wanted, watched all the wrong television programs, and circumcised their male children. Pornography ran rough shod all over you. The Cubans and the North Vietnamese stopped returning your calls.

"Don't go!" you cried, as people unthinkably went on with their lives. The clamor of living and the tyrannical cacophony of comfort drowned out your pithiest chants, obscured the view they should have had of your soul bearing signage.
"But I'm so angry and conscious! . . ." your voice trailed off, "it used to count for something."

Don't stand for this. You will not be ignored.
The time has come to lift up your head. People may have long since stopped squinting at your bumper stickers, but your voice can still be heard. Why should you be the only one burning to a crisp as the unfiltered sun beats down through the tattered remnants of the ozone layer? Why should you be forced to warn teenagers about homosexuals from the obscurity of your lawn chair? Rise up!

You who single handedly prevented the otherwise inevitable nuclear holocaust of the 1980's were not meant to be a mere footnote in history. Rise up and take your rightful place lording over people who live and work quietly and get their consciousness fix from helping others. That kind of selfishness can't go on forever. The wind blows, the pages turn. It may have taken her several months, but Cindy did finally manage to get arrested.

So take heart. The sun also rises. An old day is dawning. The pendulum is swinging. Divisive galvanization will be cool again. Haves and have-nots alike will soon be ready to hear once more how seriously screwed up everything is.

Open wide.

Roots

Sometimes, this world can really get you down. You get surrounded, engulfed, swallowed up in the cacophony--the idiocy--the punditry.
Events--or, rather, gross misinterpretations of what might be events--swirl around your head. Ignorant, one sided, venomous journalists stand on the roof tops of the flooded city of your mind and pelt you with sharp objects. The only question you get answered on the news is: What if Chicken Little had been a rattle snake?
Meanwhile, lost in the fray of oversimplified, overglorified, lukewarm ignorance, there are a few beautifully good people out there, mixing it up with a fiesty minority of truly nefarious evil people. The lukewarm majority chaffs under their title ("INFERIOR"). And somehow the prevailing doctrine becomes: trivialize the whole deal by making politics the dividing line.

And you open your mouth to scream and either nothing comes out, or nobody hears (which is worse).
Or you raise your hand to say something, and all you hear is that horrifying, indecipherable horn sound that Charlie Brown's teacher makes, and you realize you just don't speak the world's language. And you start to feel like a note that God wrote in the margin.

Then, at some unpredictable juncture, the clouds part, and light shines through in glorious clarity.
For me, this happened the other day when I dropped my keys. I bent down to pick them up, and noticed, for the first time, a really pleasant sensation.
The fabric of my pants had some stretch to it.
It made bending over a whole new experience. And I realized: These are the girls pants.
And I wondered: Where has this fabulous stretchy corduroy been all my life? The perfect cut, the perfect color and texture--AND they give a little when I need it? Shame on you, ladies, for keeping this miracle to yourselves.

Or, maybe not. It isn't for me to say who should be let into the circle and when. Really, the pants found me. It's not like I was out looking for girl pants. Even when they found me, I was wrong about what they had to offer. But here I am, finally taking that vital step past the mock enlightenment of "my ass is as hot as the day is long," to a greater truth: I am comfortable.
I don't know if the Universe put them in the men's section of my local Salvation Army on purpose. It would be presumptuous to assume such specificity in the grand scheme. But I do know this: I would never have come to the pants in their so-called "natural place." They had to come to me. This doesn't mean I'll be shopping in the women's section. But I will be keeping my eyes, and my mind, open.

Surely there are more battles to fight, more hills to climb, more barbs to endure, and more philosphical incongruencies to unravel. There is ignorance, and evil, in ever increasing quantities, encroaching daily upon the sanity of us all. But each time I bend over, I'll feel the Universe reminding me:
"No matter what else happens, child, you've experienced perfection in this fallen world. Treasure that, my child. Treasure it."

I Have Thrust My Sword into the Arena of Ideas . . . or, My Existence Has Been Encapsulated Just Above My Exhaust Pipe

Bumper Sticker Conundrum Kills Three.
Three motorists were killed, and several more injured, in a multi-car pile up Wednesday afternoon. Police on the scene said the accident was the result of a "particularly inane" bumper sticker.
Roger Cralen, who received only minor injuries, which were treated on the scene, was interviewed by police as his wife was life-flighted to Sutter Roseville ER.
"This old Volkswagen passed us and we noticed the bumper sticker that said 'honk if you hate bumper stickers that say honk if you love something.' I was about to honk, because I really hate those bumper stickers. But my wife pointed out that by honking, I was sort of
approving of those bumper stickers. The next thing we knew we were flying over the center divide."
When the Cralen's vehicle careened into oncoming traffic, they were side-swiped by a stickerless SUV which subsequently rolled accross several lanes before coming to a halt on top of a Geo Metro, whose only bumper sticker was the controversial "Mean People Suck." These two vehicles were then smashed into the fast lane by a Lincoln Continental with too many bumper stickers to name, most of which had something to do with "boogers." Medical officials on the scene reported that the drivers of all three vehilcles, (whose names are being withheld until the families can be notified), were killed instantly. At least 12 other cars had locked bumpers as traffic along the I-80 corridor came to a total stand still. Bush/Cheney stickers smashed into their Kerry/Edwards counterparts, and the driver of a "pro-choice" Honda was found pinned beneath the back wheel of a Toyota Prius bearing the Jesus Fish with the Darwin legs.

Emergency crews were able to open the far right lane as police began taking reports from eye-witnesses and victims, but progress was slow due to rubbernecking and the occasional gesture made towards one of the victim's anti war stickers.
"I don't know what's worse," said Mr. Cralen before being escorted to the hospital, "the rubbernecking or all these goddamn bumper stickers. There ought to be a law."
Police on the scene refused to lay blame for the disaster, saying only that the insurance companies will decide who is at fault, and that bumper stickers are still legal in Placer County.

The Volkswagen that allegedly caused the accident could not be located.

Ear Tags

Go ahead, say it. You'll be doing us all a favor.

We were about to start the tagging and tracking program. But identification remained a dilemma. "Where to start?" the interns said. "And what if, in our haste, we tag the wrong person?"

Judging human potential is as morally wrong as it is mathematically unsound. Hence the tracking that follows the tagging. We assume that at some future point you might well have something to contribute. But we can't have you fooling people into giving anything you have to offer any credence. You must be tagged, if only to warn potential listeners. The identification was to be based on a combination of factors: your musical tastes; your blind acceptance of dogmatic jargon from any source; your susceptibility to propaganda from either side; your bumper stickers; ETC.

It was a complex social algorithm that involved hundreds of hours before we could even tranquilize you and attach the tracking tag to your ear. The Operation was on the verge of becoming prohibitively expensive.

But you just saved us the trouble.

By suggesting that America caused or allowed populated areas to flood on the basis of race, by shooting off charges of racism in a time when people should be coming together, you have labeled yourself officially "Irrelevant to the Public Discourse." If you have recently used a natural disaster to make political hay of any kind, you can expect a brief reprieve while a minor jurisdictional dispute is settled. Just bear in mind: it is highly probable that the "Loathsome Mass of Putrid Sludge Where Your Soul Should Be" tagging study will get to you first.

We appreciate your assistance in this matter. The tagging teams have been dispatched. Enjoy your time in the cellar beneath the Arena of Ideas. We look forward to your reinstatement in what is most likely the very distant future.