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peace, love, happiness & understanding 9/24/20
September 24, 2020 - September 30, 2020
The Goddess Flora, detail from Primavera by Sandro Botticelli
THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love, happiness & understanding
September 24, 2020
HOW HIPPIES MAY STILL SAVE THE WORLD
Shortly before the Era of Social Distancing began, my friend Bill Faricy and I were eating granola for breakfast and we got to thinking about hippies and what we have given to the world. Granola, for one. And whole wheat bread. Brown rice. Organic food. Recycling. Yoga. Vegetarianism. Holistic medicine. Natural childbirth and breastfeeding. Nonviolence. Massage. Bright colors! Free love. Good vibes. The list got longer and longer.
The most challenging problem that we humans face is that the way we are living is destroying the ecological health of our planet. Hippies intuited this, and began trying to live in harmony with Mother Earth. The changes were not just on the outside, with long hair and geodesic domes. There were deeper changes in thinking, feeling and imagining.
It was obvious that hippies were not going along with the status quo. The status quo is by its nature static, and resistant to change. The hippies clothing styles were mocked, but the peace symbol and the peace hand gesture—which are now emojis—represented something which threatened the foundation of an economy built on militarism and endless war.
The hippies laid-back attitudes were inimical to the Protestant ethic of Hard Work, and to the Spirit of Capitalism. Great efforts had been made and billions of dollars spent to turn citizens into Consumers and the hippies were opting out!—making their own sandals and growing their own food. At every turn the hippies weren’t going along with The Program, and The Program was designed to create Endless Progress and Prosperity. What was wrong with them?
It turned out that there was something wrong with the global project of turning the planet into a Theme Park for Humans. The War On Nature is one we don’t want to “win.” The hippie chanteuse sang: “They paved Paradise and put up a parking lot.”
I was born in 1951, and I didn’t hear the word “ecology” before 1968 or ’69. Around 1970, the year of the first Earth Day, it became evident to anyone who was curious and who read books that there were too many people on the planet for its “carrying capacity,” and that we were not only cutting down all the trees and catching all the fish, but we were poisoning the world with our toxic chemicals and nuclear waste.
Hippies may have invented granola, and coined the expression “Have a nice day!,” but most of the things on my list of contributions made by the hippies are older things that hippies revived and gave momentum to, like yoga, massage and good vibes. Hippies weren’t the first vegetarians. Credit Buddha and Mahavira for that, about 500 BC, with their doctrines of nonviolence (ahimsa). Hippies didn’t discover organic food. Before pesticides were invented, no one ate food with poison on it. And the alarm was sounded not by hippies, but by Rachel Carson—definitely a non-hippie scientist. But the hippies read her book Silent Spring, which was published in 1965, and started organizations like the Northwest Center for Alternatives to Pesticides (www.pesticide.org).
Hippies started nonprofit organizations by the tens (or hundreds) of thousands. There are currently 1.5 million nonprofit corporations in the United States. I started two myself. There are an estimated 10 million non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the world. Hippies didn’t start them all, but hippies are part of a long tradition of nonviolent revolutionary change from the bottom up.
“Hippies” is a word like “gypsies” that can refer to all kinds of people, all over the world. There is a caricatured picture of the long-haired, barefoot, stoned hippie that the mainstream media perpetuates. And surely there is a shadow side to hippie culture. I’m just giving one hippie’s perspective on positive contributions that hippies have made, and how the Hippie Way of understanding and being-in-the-world can help us to make the transition to the Post Fossil Fuel Era as gently and beautifully as possible.
I don’t want to convert anybody to Hippieism. I became a hippie effortlessly. I looked a certain way, dressed a certain way, and thought and acted in certain ways, and people pointed at me and said: “Look, Martha, a hippie!” I wrote an email to a woman in Lebanon in 2012 and signed it: “peace & love, Johnny.” She knew I was a hippie.
My hair isn’t long at present, and I only occasionally wear a hippie-style shirt from somewhere like Nepal or Africa or Guatemala. But I think like a hippie. I believe in Peace and Love—the core hippie values. I love Mother Earth and everyone who lives here—people, plants, animals, clouds, rivers, stones.
This subject is too big for this kind of short essay. Here are the most important hippie ideas:
Nature is Sacred
Money isn’t Everything; (Money and Wealth are not the same thing)
Local Organic Agriculture
Local Economics
Community
Peace & Nonviolence
Children raised to be free, rather than obedient
Meditation & Mindfulness
Live the life you love; (Do your own thing)
Love Everyone!
I don’t have room to elaborate on all these ideas, but I’ll say a few more things. We can’t continue to destroy the ecological health of the planet. Short term financial profit is not a good enough reason to do it. It’s suicidal. And omnicidal.
One hundred years from now, food will be grown closer to where it is eaten. And most things we need will be made locally. The ecological damage inherent in large scale industrial production is unsustainable. The current economic system is unjust and inherently unstable. That which is unsustainable can’t be sustained.
If all children were raised in a loving, nurturing environment, respected as people, allowed to realize their full human potential and follow their hearts’ desires, our world would be transformed utterly. It’s a tall order. To do it, adults will have to become more loving and kind. At present, at home and around the world, physical, psychological and emotional abuse of children is the norm. (See For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Childrearing and the Roots of Violence by Alice Miller.)
Meditation and mindfulness, which hippies were instrumental in helping to bring from the East to the West, can help us to co-create a Culture That Nurtures, a culture of Peace, Love, Happiness & Understanding.
We need to aspire to love everyone unconditionally. No exceptions. No enemies. No “others.” One Human Family. It’s easy! (Much easier than what we’re doing now.) As Bob Marley sang:
One love!
One heart!
I’ll close this issue of peace, love, happiness & understanding with some Good Vibes:
Love’s In Need Of Love Today
(Spoken.) “When you say that you kill in the
Name of God or in the name of Allah,
You are truly cursing God, for that is not of God.
When you say that you hate in the name of God or Allah,
You are lying to God, for that is not of our Father.
Let us pray that we see the light.”
Good morn or evening friends
Here’s your friendly announcer
I have serious news to pass on to everybody
What I’m about to say
Could mean the world’s disaster
Could change your joy and laughter to tears and pain
It’s that
Love’s in need of love today
Don’t delay
Send your’s in right away
Hate’s goin’ round
Breaking many hearts
Stop it please
Before it’s gone too far
—Stevie Wonder
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paZEqzrrO-4)
*
What the World Needs Now
What the world needs now is love, sweet love
It’s the only thing that there’s just too little of
What the world needs now is love, sweet love
No, not just for some, but for everyone
—Burt Bacharach
(sung by Dionne Warwick: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfHAs9cdTqg)
*
All You Need Is Love
Love, love, love
Love, love, love
Love, love, love
There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done
Nothing you can sing that can’t be sung
Nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game
It’s easy
Nothing you can make that can’t be made
No one you can save that can’t be saved
Nothing you can do but you can learn how to be you in time
It’s easy
[chorus] All you need is love
All you need is love
All you need is love, love
Love is all you need
[repeat] Love, love, love…
[chorus]
Nothing you can know that isn’t known
Nothing you can see that isn’t shown
Nowhere you can be that isn’t where you’re meant to be
It’s easy
All you need is love
All you need is love
All you need is love, love
Love is all you need
—John Lennon
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7xMfIp-irg)
*
Get Together
Love is but a song we sing
Fear’s the way we die
You can make the mountains ring
Or make the angels cry
Though the bird is on the wing
And you may not know why
[Chorus] Come on people now
Smile on your brother
Everybody get together
Try to love one another right now
Some may come and some may go
We will surely pass
When the one that left us here
Returns for us at last
We are but a moment’s sunlight
Fading in the grass
[Chorus]
If you hear the song I sing
You will understand (listen!)
You hold the key to love and fear
All in your trembling hand
Just one key unlocks them both
It’s there at your command
[Chorus] Come on people now
Smile on your brother
Everybody get together
Try to love one another right now
—Chet Powers (recorded by The Kingston Trio and by The Youngbloods)
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deW7_D5qems)
*
And a hippie classic:
San Francisco
If you’re going to San Francisco
Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair
If you’re going to San Francisco
You’re gonna meet some gentle people there
For those who come to San Francisco
Summertime will be a love-in there
In the streets of San Francisco
Gentle people with flowers in their hair
All across the nation
Such a strange vibration
People in motion
There’s a whole generation
With a new explanation
People in motion
People in motion
For those who come to San Francisco
Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair
If you come to San Francisco
Summertime will be a love-in there
—written by John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas (performed Scott McKenzie)
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7I0vkKy504U)
peace & love
Johnny