Walking along the paths of the sylvan city park after a sitting at creek side, I came upon a young foursome enjoying the gorgeous afternoon. They looked like time travelers from the ‘60’s. On a tie-dyed sheet sat the ringleader, a longhaired freak in a headband, attired for Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of Love.
He held the business end of a huge water pipe in his hand, which was strategically placed at the center of the sheet. The groovy group was gathered around, blissing out. I swear the latter-day hippie gave me the peace sign as I walked by. Couldn’t stop grinning for half an hour.
We’ve already had ‘50’s redux; is it ‘here comes the sun,’ and the ‘60’s again? Maybe the kids will do it better this time.
I came of age during the social and sexual revolution of the ‘60’s. The defining event was the war in Vietnam, and the line ran between the guys who went and the guys who got out of going. The Vietnam War tore America apart and killed millions in Southeast Asia.
This was in the old days before women warriors, with the absurd notion that equality means fighting alongside the guys in America’s permanent police actions, a k a ‘The Global War on Terror.’ (The way things are going we could have a real war with Iran soon, started by Israel.)
In my first year of college I got student deferment from the war, which at that time totaled nearly half a million American young men, in service to country and disservice to humanity.
In my second year they instituted the draft, and everyone that could walk and point a gun in the general direction of the enemy of the day was eligible. I was lucky enough to draw a high number. A few years after the war ended, my father shocked me by saying, “Your mistake was not going into the military.” I replied that I would have come back in a body bag, as a killer, a drug addict, crazy, or some combination of the last three.
At the time, I shared the counterculture’s critique of American and Western society, but not its philosophy or political strategy. Even as a 19-year-old callow kid, I said the countercultural revolt had no philosophy, other than ‘End the War,’ augmented by peace and love through a hash pipe. I thought the counterculture would just trigger a reaction on the right, which is exactly what it’s done for 35 years.
Rick Santorum, dogging Mitt Romney to be the Republican nominee, is the lowest expression so far of that reaction. Santorum has made a war against ‘60’s free love the core of his presidential campaign.
“It comes down to sex. That’s what it’s all about…Woodstock is the great American orgy. This is who the Democratic Party has become. They have become the party of Woodstock. They prey upon our most basic primal lusts, and that’s sex,” sayeth the teetotaling sot. Yep, it all boils down to sex for Santorum, as it does for the criminally hypocritical Catholic Church.
Fast-forward to 2012. A young female student’s column in the local college paper contains the kind of thinking that makes Santorum and his ilk apoplectic: “Whether you’re just looking for great sex or you really want to rekindle a love, the opportunity to reconnect with an ex will eventually arise.”
I’m not condoning the let’s-hook-up-for-the-night culture that the baby boomers spawned in their children, but it’s outrageous for a Catholic, or the Catholic Church, to believe they have any moral authority left whatsoever.
Having programmed his own seven children by ‘educating’ them at home, Santorum laments that young people lose their faith when exposed to other ideas in college. He repeatedly declares that “62 percent of kids who enter college with some sort of faith commitment leave without it.”
The problem isn’t secularization vs. organized religion however. They’re two sides of the same debased coin. Neither organized religion (especially the completely disgraced Catholic Church), nor the hard or soft atheism of science and secularism respectively, offer the human being any spiritual substance.
I have a cousin that became a priest later than usual, in his mid-20’s. He rose quickly, and was even recommended for a post in the Vatican. But he recently quit the priesthood, citing blatant hypocrisy by many priests and the Vatican hierarchy. The very same priests that condemn homosexuality from the pulpit are often practicing homosexuals, he said. Even worse, the Church has unwittingly nurtured and wittingly covered up rampant pedophilia in the West for decades.
A cornerstone of Catholic scripture is the Second Coming of Christ, but I submit that the first thing Christ would do if he returned would be to completely disavow any connection with the Catholic Church.
I won’t even get into the absurd controversy over contraception, which Santorum and his fellow fascists have made the number one issue in what passes for American political discourse of late.
The ‘60’s provided the destruction of the false without the creation of anything new and true. In that respect, my generation has given the Right Wingnuts a perpetual straw man, a symbol for everything that’s rotten and wrong in American culture.
If young people are feeling drawn to the spirit of revolt of the ‘60’s, let’s hope they’re doing the spiritual and philosophical spadework for the creation of a new culture. Otherwise, we’ll just continue to have totally uncreative destruction.
Martin LeFevre
