Before you assault me with your cane, let me tell you that I am a Boomer myself, born in ‘53, raised on rock ‘n’ roll, initiated into the rites of herbal exploration, and a youthful admirer of Mickey Mantle, Muhammad Ali, Grace Slick and George McGovern. Thanks to Mr. Roosevelt’s Social Security, Mr. Johnson’s Medicare and my children having grown up, I have time to use for reading, reflection and speculation. This diary is a product of having that luxury of time.
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The world hasn’t exactly turned out the way we hoped when we were young, did it, fellow Boomer? I’m not talking about the flying cars from the Jetsons or the mission to Jupiter from 2001. What I’m not seeing is the Age of Aquarius:
Harmony and understanding
Sympathy and trust abounding
No more falsehoods or derisions
Golden living dreams of visions
Mystic crystal revelation
And the mind's true liberation
Aquarius
”Aquarius” from the musical “Hair”
Instead of harmony and understanding, we have division and hatred. Instead of sympathy and trust, we have ruthless egoism and fake news.
And instead of our world being a living dream, it’s an ecosystem whose impending collapse threatens human survival, much less human civilization.
What the fuck went wrong? Was it all our fault?
One thing we Boomers know about is getting lost. We didn’t grow up with the GPS our kids use, so we occasionally had the opportunity to travel down a dead-end street or road mistakenly, and if our current predicament can be likened to anything, it is finding oneself at the end of a lane-to-nowhere after years of thinking we were headed in the right direction.
So what do you do when you find yourself at the end of a long, dead-end road? There’s not much choice but to retrace your path to see where you took a wrong turn.
For us Boomers, it’s natural to trace things back to our youth, a fecund time full of hope and conflict. The hope is exemplified for me by the Woodstock Music Festival, an event marked by its huge size, its poor planning, its mud, and, as Joni Mitchell recorded for us in her song “Woodstock,” its extraordinary peace and sisterhood/brotherhood in the context of miserable conditions.
By the time we got to Woodstock,
We were half a million strong.
And everywhere you looked,
There was song and celebration.
Joni Mitchell, “Woodstock”
Mitchell believed that the Woodstock gathering gestated a power to transform the world in the way that we who longed for peace wanted to see:
That night I dreamed I saw the bombers
Riding shotgun in the sky.
They were turning into butterflies above our nation.
Peace. Joy. Human sisterhood/brotherhood.
What the fuck happened? Is it all our fault?
The usual answers to these questions blame our naivete along with humans’ nasty, brutish, Hobbesian nature. The problem with those answers is that they essentially doom humanity by denying us even the possibility to live in peace with each other and the Earth and its creatures. If our answer is that we could not have done any better, then we might as well eat, drink and be merry because we’re fucked as a generation, a country and a species. As Brewer & Shipley put it back in the day:
Mr. Nixon,
I ain't a fixin'
To speak Spanish on a plane or polish off the Liberty Bell.
I just want to sit here on the shelf
And watch you finish off the place by yourself.
Please just let me do what I wanna:
Just lay around the house and smoke marijuana.
Brewer & Shipley, “Oh Mommy (I Ain’t No Commie)”
But deep down, we know there is another contributing factor to the disaster that’s unfolding around us: many of us sold out. Jackson Browne wrote about it as it was happening:
I'm gonna be a happy idiot
And struggle for the legal tender
Where the ads take aim and lay their claim
To the heart and the soul of the spender,
And believe in whatever may lie
In those things that money can buy.
Who thought true love could have been a contender?
Are you there?
Say a prayer for the Pretender.
Jackson Browne, “The Pretender”
I’m as guilty as most, having represented an oil company condemning right-of-way for a pipeline at one point in my life. And I commuted too far, lived in too big a house at times, kept the thermostat too high and low, and had three kids.
I’m guilty.
But an admission of guilt does not constitute repentance. That’s too easy. Repentance necessitates a turning to a new path, and given the nature of the harm we’ve inflicted on the Earth, that means ceasing to live as if we believe that buying things, living luxuriously, or keeping up with the Joneses are what makes for a happy and meaningful life, what it means to live in harmony with the world of which we’re part. The problem for many of us, though, is what replaces materialism and consumerism, especially if we aren’t religious?
We Boomers recall that Woodstock hardly took place in a national context of peace and love. The previous five years had seen half-a-dozen high profile assassinations, scores of urban insurrections and a police riot at a Democratic National Convention, all with a horrific war going on in Vietnam and a constant threat of civilization-ending nuclear war. Yet half a million of us [sadly, not me personally] could gather in awful conditions and not just remain non-violent but actually loving and joyful.
Maybe we humans aren’t all bad. Again, it’s Mitchell who is able to tease out the question on Boomers’ minds in 1969:
Then can I walk beside you?
I have come here to lose the smog,
And I feel to be a cog in something turning, round and round.
Well maybe it’s just the time of year,
Or maybe it's the time of Man.
I don't know who I am.
But you know life is for learning.
The ongoing dissolution of Western political systems, the collapsing environment and intensifying ethnic strife remind us that this “time of Man,” a time of re-evaluating who we are and why we’re here, remains upon us since we’ve been stuck on this project for fifty fucking years. Fortunately, there’s a great deal of interest among anthropologists, archaeologists, evolutionary biologists and others in more closely examining human history and development with the aim of better understanding our capabilities for living in peace with each other and the world and creatures around us.
It turns out there are reasons for optimism. Not surprising considering that humans evolved from this world, our hunter-gatherer ancestors, as we’ve learned both from excavations and observation of the few hunter-gatherers still remaining, were in harmony with each other and the world around them. The natural world was their provider, a generous Mother. The other living creatures were their companions, playing parts in their myths and rituals, granted the respect of agency and individuality. The humans in hunter-gatherer groups were each other’s family and objects of complete trust. When an anthropologist asked an Amazonian member of the Piraha tribe why he didn’t use drying or smoking techniques to preserve meats regularly even though the Piraha knew how to use those techniques, the tribe member answered:
I store my meat in the belly of my brother.
That extraordinary level of trust in one’s group is something that we will be needing as a species as the damage we’ve done to the Earth continues to recoil on us in ever-growing waves, but it will be a challenge to find it after being raised our entire lives on self-reliance and dog-eat-dog. We may even have to shuck our Western dualism and look to the East where Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism offer worldviews that emphasize inter-human harmony more than competition and understand the Earth as an organism of which we’re part rather than a machine to be controlled or a resource store to be exploited. That shouldn’t be too tough for us Boomers, though. We came of age exposed to Alan Watts, Alan Ginsberg and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. [See Jeremy Lent’s The Patterning Instinct for this kind of argument.]
Some of these explorers of human nature attempt what amounts to the creation of an entirely new religion. Thomas Berry, a Jesuit monk and student of Teilhard du Chardin, sketches out a new faith that bears little similarity to the Roman Catholicism from which he sprung. He pictures not a patriarchal god threatening and scolding his creations but the Earth Herself laying down reality like “Network’s” Mr. Jensen with all humanity sitting in place of the Mad Prophet of the Airwaves:
[You] have disturbed the geological structure, the chemical composition, and the biological forms of this planet in a disastrous manner with [your] population explosion and technological power. [You] have closed down the creative power of the Cenozoic Era and are ending a chapter in the geobiological history of the Earth. Earth is now in a state of recession; its basic life systems have become disturbed, toxic, or are extinguished.
But it’s not all Law. Berry has Good News too:
The planet Earth might be the most unique reality in the universe precisely in its capacity for bringing forth in the unity of a single being all those various modes of physical structure, organic life, and consciousness that presently constitute the reality of this planet. It also seems that the Earth has the status of a privileged planet not simply within our Solar System but possibly throughout the entire universe.
For Berry, humans are the “highest” form of consciousness we know, and that consciousness, itself a product of Evolution that took place on this Earth, may be the form of consciousness best able in this solar system and beyond to understand and appreciate the universe. This “appreciation” can take the form of study and analysis, art, poetry, music, all the ways that humans respond to the beauty, mystery and grandeur of the world around them.
We’ll wrap it up with Joni:
We are stardust (billions year-old carbon).
We are golden (just got caught up in some devil’s bargain).
And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.
I think I’m still on that journey back to the garden, and my guess is that I’m not alone. One thing is pretty clear: if we’ve headed down the Pretender’s path after we were “young and foolish,” it’s going to take some repentance--changes in priorities, maybe even core values--before we can get back on the way to the garden. I’m going to try, if not for the hope of reclaiming some of what was present at Woodstock, then for the sake of doing whatever’s possible and right to remedy what we’ve done to the Earth before our children and grandchildren have to pay an un-payable price.
Cited in the diary and for your listening and dancing pleasure: