Do You Remember the Hippies?

Do You Remember the Hippies?

You don't hear much about the hippies anymore, but they were something big in the 1960s. I bet some of you, the old timers, remember the hippie movement. And if you're not an old timer, you might have heard a teacher tell you about the hippies in a history class or a sociology class in college.  

I wasn't a complete hippie back in the old days, but I was pretty close. I wore bellbottom blue jeans and had long hair and a beard, and I loved to protest the Vietnam War and attend the love-ins in Grant Park. I don't think often anymore about being a hippie, but something happened yesterday that got me remembering those hippie days.

I was going through a box of old letters I've received from friends over the years, and I came across one that got me remembering a science-fiction novel I read as a 20-year-old hippie back in the late 1960s.  

The book was titled Walden Two . It was written by BF Skinner, one of the great psychologists of the 20th century. It was a utopian novel set in 1948. That's right 1948, just after World War II.  Walden Two focuses on an experimental community of about 1,000 people in rural America that is set up to explore a different, better way of living. The community eliminates traditional forms of punishment and guilt; children are raised by the community rather than by their parents; and people only have to work about 4 hours a day so they can spend the rest of their time on art, science, literature, and self-improvement. The leaders of the community are psychologists and scientists working to make individuals happier, smarter, healthier, and freer.

The novel was a perfect fit for a hippie like me. Obsessed with the commune movement of the late 1960s, I was like a lot of high-school and college students across America who looked at Walden Two as a manual for dropping out of the “rat race” of the traditional society around me and creating an alternative lifestyle. The book, in fact, was one of the most popular novels of the period, selling about 250,000 copies a year.  

So now, let me tell you about the day when I read the book and what I learned about life from the book.

I read Walden Two on some sunny summer day 56 years ago. I was stoned on the drug LSD, often called acid back then, while walking along Chicago's beaches with my pal Bill Anderson who was also stoned. We spent the day reading the book outloud and drifting over and over through the sand on Fullerton Beach, North Avenue Beach, and Oak Street Beach.  

And what do I recall of Walden Two now? Not much. All I really remember is one quote, and maybe I'm misremembering it. I can't tell. Acid does that. It makes pink blue, love crummy, and Frank Sinatra into Jerry Lewis. You know what I mean.

Anyway, here's what I remember about the quote. I was reading the book as I walked on the beach, and I read a passage in the book where someone says something like “a lot of stuff about the way we live is nuts.”

That line stopped me. I thought it was the smartest and funniest thing I had ever read about life. I remember dropping my ass onto the sand on North Avenue Beach and laughing and laughing. I was laughing so hard that my pal Bill shook my head and said, “Shake it off, man, shake it.”

But I couldn't, and laughing I ran over to the lake and threw the book as far as I could into the waves, and then I started running down the beach with my arms waving above my head and my laughs trailing behind me like a veil of yellow chrysanthemums.

That was probably the hippiest moment of my hippie life.

So, let me ask you now, is the world truly nuts like Walden Two told me?

Yeah, it is, but you don't need me or any book to tell you that.

——

My latest column for the Dziennik Związkowy 

Who I Am, a collection of my columns, is available on Amazon.

Remember What It Was Like To Be Curious?

“Remember what it was like to be curious?”

I saw that question on a poster in Virginia’s Roanoke Airport this weekend.  The poster was for Carilion Clinic, a local healthcare organization.  The poster was trying to make the case that curiosity is a major healthcare value.  

Whether or not curiosity is important to maintaining my healthcare wasn’t what struck me about that poster.  

What struck me hardest was the question whether or not I remembered being curious as a kid, and even more importantly, what I was curious about.  

The answers to both questions weren’t hard to find.

I do remember being curious.  I would have been surprised not to be curious.  Some of my oldest memories are from when I was approaching my third birthday in 1951, and we were coming to America.  Interestingly, the memories are all about my curiosity, the questions I was asking my parents during that time.  

The oldest memory I have, in fact, is of something that happened before we left the Displaced Persons Camp in Vienenburg, Germany.  My mother had just sewn together a pair of shorts for me that she had made from a camouflage-colored parachute a British soldier had given her.  She dressed me in those camo shorts, gave me a rubber ball, and sent me outside to play.  However, there was no one outside to play with, and I ended up standing there by myself.  I remember thinking how odd it all felt and wondering where everyone was.  Why wasn’t my sister Donna there playing with me?  Why wasn’t my mother or my dad with me keeping an eye on me so I wouldn’t do something silly?  In my curiosity, the whole world felt like it had deserted me and gone off to play somewhere far away.  I was not a happy toddler.  In fact, I felt like I was about to start crying. 

After a few minutes, I found out why I was alone.  My dad suddenly appeared from behind a tree.  He had a camera in his hands, and he was desperate for some reason to get a photograph of me in my parachute shorts with no one around.

The second moment of curiosity I remember is also connected to a gift we received from a soldier.  When we were coming to America on the troop ship, we weren’t allowed to bring too many things.  In fact, I was only allowed to bring one toy.  It was a black doll given to me by an African-American soldier.  I loved that doll, and I remember asking my mother a question about it.  I asked her if there would be black children in America that I could play with.  I remember my mother nodding and saying, “Of course, there are all kinds of people in America.”

The third memory I have of my childhood curiosity is of the day in June 1951 when we finally arrived in America.  I remember standing on the dock with my mother and my sister by the wooden trunk my father had made and suddenly realizing my father wasn’t with us.  I turned to my sister and asked her where our father was.  She said she didn’t know.  Then, I asked my mother, and she also didn’t know.  None of us knew where my father was.  My sister said, “Maybe he got back on the ship because he wants to go back to Germany.”  My mother looked at her and just shook her head.  

Then suddenly my father appeared.  He was smiling and put his arms around all of us, and I asked him where he had been, and he smiled even more and said, “This is America.  I’ve been to America.”

Is There a God?

 Is There a God?

Do I think now that there's a God? I don't know. I do know that the God of religion is freaky and not someone I want to have any thing to do with.

Religion softens God, makes him someone you want to have coffee with, someone you can call on to help out in the garden.

Religion asks you to forget the tsunamis and earthquakes like the one that killed so many in Nepal a while ago and recently destroyed so many of the islands and so much of Texas and sooner or later will come to a neighborhood near you.

The God of most religions wasn't listening when 6 million Jews died, when 50 million other civilians died in WWII, and you can bet he’s not listening now

He's out to lunch and we're stuck with his substitute: the god of religion, all of the religions (there are about 40000 different Christian denominations) that keep us in our place with lies about the true God, the God of no religion.

New Poems about My Parents and the War

 War Literature and the Arts

Of The US Air Force Academy journal WLA just published 7 new poems of mine about my parents and their experiences in the German concentration and slave labor camps.  

The journal also published a prose piece of mine about growing up with two survivors.

Here’s the link.  Just click on the numbers in the image or on the word memoir.  

Here’s one of the poems.  

My Mother’s First Winter in Germany

My mother never thought she’d survive

that first winter in the slave labor camps.

She had no coat, no hat, no gloves,

just what she was wearing when the Germans

came to her home and killed my grandmother

and took my mother to the labor camps.

A German guard saved her life there.

He saw her struggling with her hands

to dig beets out of the frozen earth,

and he asked her if she could milk a cow.

She said, “Yes,” and he took her to the barn

where the cows were kept and raped her.

Later, the cows kept her from freezing

and gave my mother warm milk to drink

https://www.wlajournal.com/copy-of-draft-v37-landing-page

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Heaven?

When I get to heaven, I expect to find my mom & dad & my sister at the kitchen table in our old apartment on Evergreen St in Chicago.  

My sister will be 5 years old again.  

I'll be 3.  

My mom will put her perfect poppyseed cake on my plate and tell me to sit and enjoy.

A Call from a Dying Friend

I got a call yesterday from an old friend.  

He told me he is dying and only has a year or so more.  There is nothing the doctors can do.  

He asked me to send him a book he and I both loved when we were kids growing up. 

He knows I still have it. It’s Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs.  It’s a science fiction/fantasy novel about a man who “dies” here on earth and is reborn on Mars.

My copy of the book is old, maybe 60 years old. He touched it and I touched it.  Reading it as kids we turned its pages, wondered at its magic.  I wrote some notes in it.  He did too. I wonder what he’ll think when he sees those notes.

It's odd.  I've lost 5 of my good friends from childhood already.  They all went the same way, in silence, with no one near, only wives and lovers.  I wonder if this is the way it is.  Finally, the only bonds are the truest ones.

My God is God/Your God is the Devil

My God is God/Your God is the Devil

I grew up in a Catholic family.  Went to Catholic schools.  Even thought about being a priest at one time.  

I've always thought about God and how I see Him and how other people -- people who had a totally different world views -- see him.

This sense of the difference between how others see my god and how I view their gods has intensified in the last dozen or so years, especially after 9/11. 

I wrote a poem about it, and I've been thinking about it recently.

Here's the poem -- really two poems.

GODS

1.  My God is God

My God lives in heaven and He lives here

In my heart and the hearts of those around me.

His thoughts are pure and true and gentle, 

and his truest wish is to dream of babies 

playing in water soft as white roses.

When His lips come together in a smile 

The heavens smile too and the rains say

“Goodbye, goodbye, the sun is coming”

And when He smiles men are never hungry 

and their wives have eyes as soft as roses too.

And where my God is, there are no strangers,

only brothers who will take our hands

And kiss our cheeks for luck along the road,

No matter how hard it is, no matter how long.

2. Your God is the Devil

He wears a broken hat and dead men’s clothes

and he comes from a place where men are hungry

and children die in the dirt waiting for dawn.

Nothing your stupid god wishes for comes true:

If he prays for peace he gets cyclones,

twisters that shred his skin like razors

and rain sorrow on all who pray to him.

If he wishes for love among brothers

he gets brothers who spit at each other,

fathers who beat their sons on their weddings days, 

daughters who flaunt their evil shoes and dresses

before their mothers and holy grandmothers.

Your god is a straw thing who fears my boot

And what I can do to him with my hands.

—

The poem appears in my book of poems True Confessions, available from Amazon.