Woodstock crowd (Aug., 1969) 
                            (credit: James M. Shelley, via Wikimedia Commons) 

                                                 Old Hippy Dreams

 

Preface

I realized during my sixth year of teaching that I did qualify as a “hippy” in most ordinary folks’ eyes. Nine or ten staff of the school where I was working at the time were letting off steam in the staff room. Someone was griping about a kid who often came to class stoned on marijuana. Or something. The teacher didn’t know. The principal, a good guy, a total professional with whom we got on well, asked in a genial way whether any of us in the room had ever experimented with marijuana in our earlier days. Only two, myself and an Art teacher, waved a hand and laughed. I, being my usual brash self, piped up, “And acid (LSD) and MDA [an early form of Ecstasy], but only a couple of times.”

The room went dead. Fisheyes stared at me. Oh, oh. Body language closed off. I had become another species, for most other teachers, anyway.

About four years before, I’d still had long hair. Middle of my back. My first principal had let me keep it. I got tired of it about ’77 and cut most of it off. So, I’d had shorter hair for two years before this staff room conversation. But I’d had the hair, played a lot of gigs in a band with stardom dreams, and so on.

And done a few drugs. Not many.

As I look back, though, it’s something else that makes me see myself as a hippy even now.

You see, I believed in the dream. The Woodstock Dream. Peace, love, and music. We were on the brink “of a new heaven and a new earth” (Revelation 21:1). We were so many – Boomers, as we’re called now – and so passionate. In my circle, anyway, we believed it. And maybe, say it “peace, love, sex, drugs, and rock and roll.” Easy access to reliable birth control, especially for the girls compared to their mothers’ generation. Only two STDs, and they were easily cleared up by antibiotics. And drugs? They were everywhere. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll. And, for some, revolution. I knew people who had lists in their wallets of local authorities to assassinate “when the revolution comes.” And they believed it would. 

That part, I never bought into. I did not, and do not, endorse violent revolution. Sadly, violence sometimes becomes unavoidable, but when it does, that is because too many of us have let democracy deteriorate for too long. Anyway, I never endorsed violence back in my hippie days. But I knew people who did.  

By ’75, the hippy dream was starting to look naive. But for a while, ’67 to ‘72, maybe, it was more real than this keyboard I’m touching now. So many of us, so inspired, and so young and, God, so wide-eyed beautiful! We’d never lose.

I was fortunate to become a teacher, I guess. I was able to keep the dream even in the midst of making a living. My dark secret now, as an old man, is that the core of hippiedom is with me still. I never gave it up. Love. Art. Music. Peace. I will carry that dream to my grave. But no drugs or alcohol. They bore me now.

That dream is what this essay is about. I think I see a way to reach it. Gradual and hard, but doable. A rational case for a way out of the fear, greed, and hate – the madness that has been the human way for so long. This essay will make a case for Moral Realism, a worldview that offers a logical argument for the dream of peace and how we could make it happen.

(For my fellow philosophers, I am going to derive ‘ought’ from ‘is’.)

I hope you find reason in what I have to say below. It’s what I leave to my kids and grandkids, and to the thousands of students that I taught over 33 years in my profession, and to those my own age who still believe it could be made real.

Decency and Sense live if we work daily to make them live in human hearts. But Decency and Sense do live. They change how their adherents talk and act. And then, in the heroism of every day, they become rooted and actualized in how we treat each other and how we do our work. They become real.  

And they live. History says so. Loud and clear.

I hope deeply that what will follow here will renew your resolve, even in these dark times. What I have to say is not new. I am only offering a theoretical model to support most of what’s called the ‘liberal agenda’. A general sense that our values are real is helpful, but a scientific model of exactly why those values are real and of how they work is much more reassuring, inspiring, and empowering. Now, we can target our words and actions toward peace. The difference is not much or it’s everything, depending on the degree of the perseverance with which we use the model as we incorporate it into our daily words and actions.

Moral Realism is a rebuttal of moral relativism and postmodernism. Moral clarity may enable a lot of people who are wavering now to freshen their resolve.

Some parts of what I say may sound cliché, but we do well to remind ourselves that clichés get to be clichés because they say things true. They just need renewing in our hearts once in a while.

 

“And I dreamed I saw the bombers, riding shotgun in the skies, turning into butterflies above our nation.” (Joni Mitchell)

 

“Men can live as brothers, candles in the rain.” (Melanie Safka)   

 

             Carlos Santana, Jose Areas, Michael Carabello  at Woodstock (Aug., 1969)

                (credit: pophistorydig.com/topics/santana-woodstock-1969 )