You see, I remember what happened in the 60’s, that’ll be the 1960’s.
We didn’t like what our parents were about, we didn’t like the future they and school and the establishment had for us, in which we were not engaged in making a choice, because no choice was offered.
For me it meant the factory, slaving away for pitiful pay and a future that held no promise except more of the same. I was dying of boredom and ennui before I’d even learned the job.
The factory I worked in made records, and the Beatles were happening and my brother stole the albums and I stole the covers and we played them till the next one saved us from wearing a hole through the vinyl.
The Hippy movement blossomed and I embraced it like a drowning man grasping a life preserver. Nothing else mattered, we discovered our youth, we discovered a whole new revolution in music, we discovered an anarchic way of dressing (some naysayers called it a uniform, and why not, a magnificent anarchic tribal uniform) proclaiming our separateness from the world of our parents and the system. We handed out flowers on the street and made the girl on the till smile. We created a sexual revolution and plunged right in at a time when sex before marriage was a sin and a big fucking deal.
We made something happen that was entirely separate from the world our parents inhabited. We had free concerts and were members of an exclusive club – Youth. It was a cultural revolution the like of which had never existed before. It came on the back of WWII and coincided with the emergence of mass production, Americas gift from the Industrial Revolution, and a time of plenty. I left the factory and began drifting from job to job merely for money to fund a lifestyle. I left jobs before I died of boredom and could have another by the next week.
We founded an anti-war movement, we protested against the Vietnam war, and America killed protesters on their own campus at Kent State University in their own land [1]. We created the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and a symbol that lasts to this day as a symbol of peace and CND still exists as an anti-nuclear weapons protest organisation which uses that symbol as its logo [2].
That youth revolution changed who I was, how I thought, my attitude to the world, the establishment, the system. A system that uses everything in its power to assert itself against all comers, including the Hippy movement. But the battle for hearts and minds isn’t over, as much as they’d have us believe it is. It takes enormous resources for them to maintain their status quo and they spare no price or lives to maintain it, backed by a billionaire owned, corporate media, propaganda machine.
What the world needs now is another movement, not a protest movement, not an anti anything movement, a positive movement, a hope filled, exuberant life movement. Something irrepressible, something that doesn’t give a shit about Boris Johnson or Donald Trump or the machinations of power and their billionaire backers. We need something unstoppable. Not just something to do, some action to take, but a something to believe in that infects and affects every aspect of our lives for the good, for what’s wholesome and sustainable, desirable and worth having and holding.
Something that is everything the pugnacious, power mad, lying, cheating, stealing, murdering, pricks in power are not and fear more than anything else. Liberation. In our heads and hearts. Something more powerful than the goggle box. Education. The system. The work place. The daily grubbing for money over which they hold the spigot that restricts its flow and keeps people obedient and docile to the dictates of their power.
The answers will never come from above. Not now, not ever. They are not open to persuasion, the doors are locked and we are on the outside. We are the working stock, the wealth makers, who they despise, and they are the wealth takers, which they absolutely consider their due, right and privilege to possess. And have done from time immemorial.
We need a new game in town. Something that is not a mass movement, like the hippies, we’re beyond that. That was the liberation of youth, which they never fully recaptured, though they are still trying. Think Michael Gove and his rote learning, the disgusting little man rat [3].
It’s our hearts and minds that need liberating. For free. As a personal gift to our precious selves. Not some profiteering money maker of the new age liberated self, published in America, to make some grasping head fucker rich. That’s just as establishment as Coca Cola and Pepsi, part of the American dream, how to be a success, nightmare.
That’s the reason I’ll never publish a book. It has to be live. Text book free. No followers of a doctrine or way. A personal internal, hard sought and hard won liberation that sticks because it’s real, up front and personal.
It’s hard. And it’s getting harder. We’re in a very hard place and I’ll leave it to Beans on Toast to explain it better and more succinctly than I can, plus it saves me reinventing the wheel.
What a time to be alive.
KOG. 11 September 2020.
[1] http://www.lessonsite.com/ArchivePages/HistoryOfTheWorld/Lesson31/Protests60s.htm
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2012/nov/14/michael-gove-backs-learning-by-rote
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-38UGtPelks&ab_channel=BeansonToast
Conspiracy of Kindness 