this is an article written by a kind friend of mine Being American disturbs me. It's like dodging heavy traffic at the intersection. Everyone's moving quickly in different directions and I'm caught in the middle, not knowing how to get to the other side. My "love-hate" relationship with it grows day by day. The more I hear about the Constitution and the rights it protects, the more my respect increases for America's foundation. But the closer I look at what we're like now, the actual society that developed from that foundation, I'm appalled. I'm repelled by the success raging around me. I'm alienated from it. I see it all as heedless selfishness, reckless waste, and blind hedonism. But the most bitter pill to swallow is the numbing emptiness that fills our middle class and its life-style. That's what disturbs me the most. It's so hard to appreciate the benefits of our civilization when I see what we've done to this planet. It's difficult to see the value of our nation's foundation (which is better than any on earth) when the economics it supports causes us to live for ourselves in total selfish independance. A lot of people recognize this, but no one knows what to do about it. What can we do? Leave America? Overthow it? Change it? Drop out of it? Start going back to our roots? Build a new foundation? Don't get me wrong. I'm not a revolutionary. I really respect the thinking of the Founding Fathers. They recognized the role of selfishness in human behavior. They expected that people would be selfish. They expected selfishness in all its many manifestations -- aggrandizement, strife, manipulation, moral tyranny, rebellion -- to be the controlling force in human behavior. They even expect class warfare. They expected many things and they attemped to build a government that would limit these opposing force. However, there was one thing they couldn't have imagined. They couldn't have imagined the problem of sucess. What do you do when you become economically successful? Prosperity has touched America in many different ways. Our society today is much narrower than what the Founding Fathers could possibly have imagined. Growing up in America, my contact with other adults of people who had formed charachters was really limited. That is, I was given a lot of contact with unformed children. I was given limited contat with teachers and educational people. I had a little contact with ministers and people like that. And when I played sports, I had contact with coaches. But actually I was given very little contact with other adults. They were all working and out making a living. There were very few adults I really got to know outside the boundaries of my immediate social circle. I grew up more as a consumer than as a participator. When I went to a sports event, I went to watch it. When I went to a social event, I went to watch it. I was part of a mass of people who consumed the experience together. Television was the prime example of that. I was never put in a place where i was forced to communicate, to really deal with other people with differing values and differing beleifs. The people I mostly encountered were just those within the social circle of my own family. They were all basically people of the same religious and political views and personality types. The hard go-getters were outside our circle, over there. The more laid-back, classical, cultured types were over here. I didn't really get a cross-fertilization. My human potential wasn't stimulated very much through contact with all kinds of different people. I was left isolated. I grew up untouched except in certain specific areas. I think that left me very shallow, and quite fearful of what I didn't understand. Basically, I was lonely. MORE MIDDLE CLASS WOES Think about how you felt when you went shopping. You're one of many people picking up items. Your only human contact is the few minutes you're waiting in line as you go out the door. Contrast that with say, a different sort of lifestyle where a person goes to the market place and spends several minutes exchanging conversations with different merchants and traders while haggling over prices. What a much greater social even that is! Granted we are in a hurry to make money and get on with the more serious business of living, but I think it leaves us really empty. There is a cost you pay for avoiding all those distractions that keep you from doing your own thing. You never actually meet people. You never actually talk to them. I think it leaves you shallow. It leaves you unchallenged in your own thinking, unexperienced at differing ways of coming at life, naive in the realm of beliefs, unacquainted with different possibilities of solving things. RELATIONSHIPS OR PRIVACY? Most everyone I meet at the Rainbow of the Grateful Dead (who are not just there for the opportunity to partake of drugs or alcohol) are there because they want human contact without a lot of formal restrictions. They want to meet people without having to fit some form. They want to be who they are, to work together, to be together, to talk to one another and to not have any forms on them. They want to just experience one another. I think that's an indictment to the intense structure of the human contact that takes place in most middle class living. Your contacts with people are really narrow, limited. But I think they are people who really want human contact. There are those who want to know people. And not just from the same social circle, but different people from different backgrounds. I think that if you grow up in a society that values material sucess, you don't get your wealth and your nice house to share it with others, you get it to hide yourself. Increasing social status is always marked by increased privacy. The pinacle of it is: who knows who the really rich are? Who can see them, who can talk to them on a first name basis? We all have really limited contact with those kind of people. And yet, of all people, they have the most to give, the most to share, the most to contribute. It's a paradox -- they're the most isolated of all. I think that people who come to the Rainbow gathering are looking for something else. They're after the exact opposite. They want to share, they want to contribute, they want to give. They don't want a bunch of dogma or doctrine. They don't want to be regimented and told how to give and who to give to and why they are giving. They just want to be themselves, and somehow in the process, find themselves. AMERICAN EDUCATION Even with education, we are constantly forced to cope with that American pressure to be an economic sucess. It's as if food, shelter, and clothing are not enough. We have to advance. We've got to increase our economic secuirty. And that process starts when we are very young. The idea is presented in two ways. One -- you can make a lot of money. Or two -- you can make enough money to afford to do what you want to do. Whichever path you chose, education is the way to get there. It has been told to you over and over. It's an American belief. It's the road to that. It's come to be that education-for-it's-own-sake is economically beneficial. Whenever they started to stipulate that a high school diploma or college degree was necessary for getting a job, they made it even more essential to stay in school. Unfortunately, that's really an arbitrary standard. There is nothing in particular that a college or high school degree prepares you to do. It doesn't really mark somebody's ability to do a particular job. But it does mark a societal value. What it does, it trains you to think that education is able to outfit a person with a good enough job to support himself. Forget about finding out about the truth. Just get a job. Most children get that message. They learn enough to get by, so that one day they won't have to be digging ditches. So basically we bribe them to be stimulated and to think a little bit. But that kind of education, even though it has the possibility of really opening them up, leaves most children set on only one main course, the persuit of the "good life." There's a lot you are offered. Teachers go out of their way to try and give you alternatives, to make you think in different ways, to really challenge you, to stimulate you to really develop your characher and your ability to think about life. Yet the overall direction of education in America is not towards opening you up to the whole potential of what it means to be a human being, it's to direct you into the mainstream economy. And into mainstream American life. These keep you headed on the way to get that individual home, have your own individual family, and be part of all the selfishness and loneliness that's there. The selfishness is there. I'm not just imagining it. You can see it in the enormous economic waste it generates. The kind of system we live in is really a pyramid that sucks in vast amounts of resources from all over the earth in order to maintain these individual little palaces that exist in America. The higher you go toward the top of the pyramid, the more you need from others to support yourself. You see this life-style begin in the middle class. And education perpetuates it. It doesn't open you up to the possibility there there might be another way for people to live. It just perpetuates the system that exists in America today. (Oh, it might manage to make you feel a little guilty about it, but it doesn't provide a way out.) CHAINED TO THE TV Here you are. You live in a free society that has proclaimed that you have a right to persue happiness. But the way you were raised in the home causes you never to stop and think of all the possibilities that could mean. Really when we talk about that, we have to start with television. The kind of life that television presents as normal is just as narrow and as limited as our social contacts are. (Remember, you don't really meet that many different kinds of people.) And even if you did, and they made it into your home, you wouldn't get past their name because of television. The constant distraction of having the television on prevents us from really listening to other people. I think that what I am trying to say about television is what John Jacques Rousseau said, "Man is born free, and is everywhere is chains." Even though I personally don't feel that man is born free, I do agree that he is given chains by society. You will never find freedom apart from dealing with the society you've been raised in. One of the chains that binds the soul of any American is the television he watches. Year after year, it teaches us over and over again. It shapes us in so many ways. It constantly reminds us of the "real" values of life. (Well, we come to think of them that way after we've seen them enough) We're taught the role of violence, the role of sexuality, how to be beautiful and how to relate to people. We learn what it means to be a human being through what we see. The writers and producers of television put into us a view of what life is all about. And I think that's a dangerous thing. I don't think that they know any better than you or I what life is or should be. The worst thing about television and the programs that are on, is that the people who are writing them have grown up under television themselves. They are as affected by what they saw as we are. So it's self-perpetuation. Somehow specific examples escape me, but the mind-numbing nature of it does not. These are some of the chains that tie you to a society whose values are anti-human in the long run. There is a violation of human nature when you seperate people and divide them up in little bitty houses and just let the young people talk to the young people and the old people talk to the old people and the middle-aged working people talk to the working people. When you keep the adults away from the children, you begin to destroy a pattern that most cultures have had for thousands of years. The tribal structure -- having elders, families, and children all living together, passing on a way of life from one generation to the next -- is what's most normal. I think that American life with all of its material sucess takes us further away from that. And I think that's why people don't know what to do with themselves. That's part of what it means to be American. To be stressed. To live with tremendous competition. The life we live in the Community here is a vehicle that will carry us into freedom. We see ourselves as being profoundly damaged by these things. But we are heading away from them. We are using the political and economic freedoms that our contry offers as a way to get out of the decay that we see going on all around us. PULLED FROM EITHER SIDE During your educations, at a certain point, you turn 15 or 16 and you start to be taught (television has already taught you this) that an extremely important aspect of your fulfillment will be a member of the opposite sex. A lot of people spend enormous amounts of their life trying to find that fulfillment. And they do it in an atmosphere of immense confusion. Because it is a peculiarly American trait to give you equal acess to everybody's view on the subject. And so here you are. You're a young person growing up. You're presented with traditional morality on one hand as the standard, and anything goes on the other. It is essential that you would be sexually attractive and sexually active, but also that you listen to the voices of restraint coming from the other direction. One says, "You should be married and be responsible." (I guess AIDS has taught us to be a little more cautious.) The other challenges, "You need to be beautiful, attractive, and stimulating to members of the opposite sex." This has gone deeply into us. We are all really concerned about whether or not we fit that description and what people will think about us. "Am I a man?" "Am I desireable, and handsome enough?" "Am I beautiful?" Everyone feels the same way. We grow up aiming our whole life at being acceptable. THen you have the homosexuals who stand outside the conventional roles. THey not only have to deal with wanting to be acceptable to members of their own sex, but also with feeling the need to get an equal share of society's approval themselves. And so you are bombarded, literally, with all these messages all at once. You don't really know where to turn. If you go to the modernists and prophets and best selling authors for help, they say that being normal is where we are going. What definitions are they using? Can sexuality be seperated from having a family and children? Love and intimacy are not candied treats to be eaten for pleasure. They are gifts to make two persons into one. Marriage should produce happy, secure children who are glad to be alive and find their purpose by being connected to their parents' lives. The only way back from where we've been (or still are) is to be willing to face the truth. We are going to have to come to hear our hearts and follow that voice of our conscience no matter what the cost. And when you finally grow up, you have to deal with the fact that you're going to be on your own soon and you're going to have to make your living. That's when push finally comes to shove. You enter full-fledged into job and career. Life is essentially a series of jobs until you hit upon a career that carries you along. You spend a lot of time and pay a lot of money to get to that place, but then you find out that the security of the whole system that supports you depends on you doing your part. You are locked in. This security is the very life of America, and yet it's so empty for so many millions of people. DO WE REALLY NEED FREEDOM? They put up with it anyway because they expect no better. But I think that it;s really a denial of the possibility that life can be different and better. Many have come to realize that we don't have to just work every month year after year for ourselves, and for no higher purpose than to just make sure that the bills are paid. If that were true, they ought to stamp on the headstones of all the economically-solvent people "He paid his bills." So there would be at least something to show for all the anguish people went through just to keep their heads above water. But there is no recognition to it because all it is, is selfish survival. Deep down people know it. They can't openly be proud of it. We can't be satisfied with bread alone. If economic security is what freedom means, then you don't really need freedom. You can come up with a system that will give you the choices of work and pleasure without all the legal safeguards we have here in America. Communism, socialism, different forms like that would be more than adequate. We could get "beyond freedom and dignity" to what really counts -- food, shelter, clothing, and our personal version of "MTV." WHAT I WANT TO DO I think that human freedom is something that we were given to use. We need something in our hearts strong enough to face our fears and anxieties (even the anxieties of making a living) so we can create something different. I cannot stand the thought of day after day, year after year, checking into a job I don't believe in just to make a living. I can't live that way. Something inside of me dies when I think of that. I've got to find another way. I don't care if I don't have everything that everybody else has -- those things are not where it's at. There is something deeper in me. I have to know that I am living the life I was created to live. I have to know that I am actually affecting people, that I am a benefit to people and not just living for myself. The spirit within me is no longer satisfied with selfish survival. I want to be washed of that whole way of living. I don't want to live half-heartedly, in form, for no purpose. I don't want to be forced to be compassionless, because I have to get my job done. I don't want to ever say, "Everyone is just doing their job. There's nobody worthy of compassion anyway." I want to live in a place where I can live from my heart, where I don't have to be ashamed. My father did stuff in his job that he was ashamed of, and that's why he quit it. And he was not released. He was not free to do everything that was in his heart to do. He wasn't free to pour himself out. So what is the solution? There is another way besides the American way. Human beings can live tribally. They can live and work together out of genuine concern for each other's welfare. Under good authority, the tribe is protected and receives direction from those who have wisdom. True authority comes from a life. No appointment from "higher up" or political maneuvering can attain it, nor can intelligence or ambition. The leadership that will have the authority to gather and help coordinate the tribe will have a life and a heart worthy of trust. That authority is essential in dealing with the problem of selfishness. The reason that the gathering of the tribes isn't taking place on a large scale is selfishness. Who is willing to abandon all personal persuits and be solely devoted to building a new society -- not just promoting your own pet ideas, but getting down in the dirt and digging out a foundation and building according to the plan of an architecht that is greater than yourself? Selfishness even tarnishes our brightest dreams of an alternative life. There is no problem as long as each individual can pursue his own private version of paradise and promote his own ideas. But nothing new will ever be established that way. You can be a fringe member of a tolerant society and promote different ideas. This does not cost very much. People have been doing it for ages. But to lay down your very notion of how things should be and move with others as a unit, as a people, and really make a difference -- that costs everything. And who will give up his own ideas, his own will, to bring about the will and plan of another? That's where the deepest roots of self-concern get touched. Nobody wants to waste his life following somebody else that is probably just as selfish as he is. Maybe if we wait around long enough, we will all sort of flow together painlessly into one direction and pick up enough speed to get from where we are now to where we would all like to be. But it has never happened in human history. And all those who have ever actually brought anything about (even a loosely organized gathering in the woods) know the answer to this question: "Can we plead for painless progress with plastic smiles on our faces?" So the issue is, how can human beings be freed from this highly-cultivated self-regard that we find so deeply in us? Who will lead the way? And who will follow? Our help can't come from other mere human beings who are just interested in promoiting their own ideas. The only kind of person worth following would be somebody who totally gave up his own life and goals. Someone whose focus was not inward but outward, directed toward others. And the only ones who would follow would be those willing to lose their own lives and goals and become totally consumed with this same care and concern for others. This is the essence of love, and love is the essence of the new life that everyone is waiting to see come about.
The essay makes me think of the relgious groups that followed each other to the new world to start a life and live in freedom. Migrating groups pf people settling a land to build a society based on their beliefs. Groups like the Amish, Gypsys, Mormons. The bohemians and hippies in the 60's were coming together in big cities like San Franscisco looking for a movement to create a new society. The will and resources were there but there was no place to really go to settle. A few groups started communes. Thats the problem i see. A group, like the Rainbows, creating a permeneant society have no place to go. The massive lands and free space over America have been claimed by the different govt. entities and these entities want groups and individuals contributing to their interests not a new society and its interests. I want to add that I think young people today are going to be shocked when they realize the American dream and economic security and the 'freedoms' it offers through education has changed. The new variable is debt from life long student loans that are needed to pay the inflated costs of the degree. The economic formula of the degree and its rewards have changed.
they have no place to go, yes, but i think they are also missing a few other key factors -- they are missing the authority to actually bring about what is in their hearts. i would classify the rainbows as a "tolerent society which you can be a fringe member of." time has proven that most communal movements have failed, because they are missing some very important key factors that are essential to the makeup of a society. we can only learn from this. it's interesting to think though, what would have happened to the hippies of the 60's if they had a whole new country to colonise. even then, who would have been their george washington, their thomas jefferson? obviously if their communes are falling apart 10, 20, 30 years later, then so would their countries. who is the george washinton in the USA today? we don't have one.
