Social Change

• Make the revolution at home.

• Don’t change institutions • Change your own heart and mind • Live as you would like to live in a perfect society • Others will follow your example

Social Change: hearts & minds

• It was a chance to be freely youthful and not live up to anybody’s expectations, and to re-create the world in the way we thought was right, which really didn’t happen. But we made the world a lot more colorful.

• I think the best way to make a statement is by example. Be the best person you can be and show others that kindness gets you what you need and is more effective than cruelty or judgment.

Q: Did he influence young People because he broke The rules?

Dylan: It ’ s not a question of Breaking the rules, don ’ t You understand? I don ’ t break The rules because I don ’ t see any rules to break. As far as I ’ m Concerned, there aren ’ t any rules.

• The idea was the politics of consciousness. ..if you could get people thinking clearly, they’d free themselves. They key is freedom So everything that Abbie did was to get you to dissolve, or to undermine, or to undercut or to loosen up the shackles that keep all of our minds from being free,

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"The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can't be any large-scale revolution until there's a personal revolution,on an individual level. It's got to happen inside first. You can take away a man's political freedom and you won't hurt him- unless you take away his freedom to feel. That can destroy him. That kind of freedom can't be granted. Nobody can win it for you." --Jim Morrison, lead singer of the Doors

• How does the individual imagination get liberated and self-empowered? And then how do you bring it down to earth and one of Kerouac’s answers to that was “walking on water wasn’t built in a day.”

• To create events which had their meaning implicit in them and which, by performing them, created the culture that you’d rather live in. You didn’t have to propagandize, you just performed the acts, and they invoked the change itself.

• The effects of 60’s cultural revolution. . . Everyone is trying to prove that nothing happened or that America has gone back to apple pie and right-wing militarism and so forth. . . The victories won in the 60’s can never be undermined, because they’re victories in people’s minds. And once you free people’s minds, it’s very hard to turn them off again.

• When we came to the 60’s, America had a system of legalized apartheid. . . We did not end racism, but we ended legalized apartheid in this country. And they will never go back on that.

• We did not end militarism in this country, in the world, but never again will the American people allow a military clique in the Pentagon to send a million young people a 1000 miles across the globe to fight a war that the people do not want.”

Social change: communes

Emerson

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Man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but . . . laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present.

Wedding in New Buffalo

Yoga class at New Buffalo

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Thoreau: It would be some advantage to live a primitive and frontier life, ..if only to learn what are the gross necessaries of life and what methods have been used to obtain them...For the improvements of ages have had but little influence on the essential laws of man’s existence; as our skeletons, probably, are not to be distinguished from those of our ancestors

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House-building at New Buffalo

Communes were a way of self-preservation for people of like minds. We had all long admired the way the original peoples of this land had lived their lives and people wanted to emulate. . .

I am bound to praise the simple life, because I have lived it and found it good. When I depart from it, evil results follow. I love a small house, plain clothes, simple living. Many persons know the luxury of a skin bath-a plunge in the pool or the wave unhampered by clothing. That is the simple life-direct and immediate contact with things, life with the false trappings torn away-the fine house, ...the expensive habits, all cut off. To see the fire that warms you, or better yet, to cut the wood that feeds the fire that warms you; to see the spring where the water bubbles up that slakes your thirst, and to dip your pail into it;...to be in direct and personal contact with the sources of your material life; to want no extras, no shields; ...to be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated over a bird's nest, or over a wild flower in spring these are some of the rewards of the simple life.

-John Burroughs, "What Life Means to Me"

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Janis at Taos

As late as 1828 Frances Trollope reported:

The woman told me that they spun and wove all the cotton and woollen garments of the family, and knit all the stockings; her husband, though not a shoemaker by trade, made all the shoes. She manufactured all the soap and candles they used, and prepared her sugar from the sugar-trees on their farm. All she wanted with money, she said, was to buy coffee and tea, and whiskey, and she could ‘get enough any day by sending a batch of butter and chicken to market.’

- Ruth Brandon, Singer and the Sewing Machine 14 This is the life the Taos communards were trying to live: a simple, pre-industrial, life not based on cash.

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• A couple of men came and joined the family who were from some other planet. God knows where they came from. But they walked into the Hog Farm and started cooking food. I remember very well. . .Ken Babbs sits down there and he starts making himself a pair of pants. Unbelievable! A man sewing! This couldn’t happen. And he cooked too!. . . And then little by little, it all sort of changed over. I think the women did some pushing.

• LAW, p 80 bottom of the page • “This woman got it”

• Before the 60’s everyone knew that women were there to help men…”We did not end sexism, but consciousness is raised so that everyone is aware of this issue and has to deal with it on an individual basis.

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• Abbie Hoffman • “We were young, we were silly, we made mistakes, we were obstinate, we were naïve, but we were right. I regret nothing.”

• There was a desire for communes, new kinds of experiments with the family structure, and peace and quiet in the rural areas. And just a desire to run naked in the woods, I think, was part of it: to get back to nature, as Walt Whitman wanted to. . .& organic food & a desire to try psychedelics in a . . .home in nature.

• Communes were both a social experiment in living with less, using less and an economic reality. No one had any money, so people had to split rent. It was also a richer and fuller way to live than the nuclear families. It was wonderful to sit down to dinner with 30 people and to play music with 20 of them. . .people were self-consciously hunting for alternatives. ..

• The primary reason for going back to the land was the realization of the ecological fix that we were in: that small-scale, appropriate technology, organic gardening, and some 19th cen.

technologies like windmills were in the long run more healthy and sensible than large-scale agribusiness.

• Second the overpopulation of the cities and the need to get out from the noise and the crime and the dope and the hyperactive business mentality of he cities and return to some healthy observation of nature, like the seasons, to see stars, the moon, sun, and the natural growth and flowering of plants.

• It is a transformative space in which people live very close to the earth with their firewood runs and outhouses and very simple vegetarian food and the kids are there and the gardens and as I walk in the woods and sit by the fire in the circles as we chant together, I feel like I’m reconnecting to the roots of my being.

• We thought we could create new economic and social structures, alternative cultures, the communes…we had all sorts of ideas about how we would do it and a lot of us went off and tried it and we learned a lot that has been very useful since then. But were were also very naïve.

• We thought we could translate that vision directly into action and it’s taken us 20 years to come to appreciate just how to do that. And we’re learning that the work outward and the work inward have to go apace.

Sexual Revolution

We took our credo “Make Love Not War” literally.

Sensuality became a way of life. Sexual exploration replaced “Wham, bam, thank you ma’am.”

Early 60’s came the Pill & the Sexual Revolution Rejection of old sexual taboos While the Christian influenced establishment saw the body as shameful, and sex as sinful unless confined to marriage, .

the CC reverted to the old Greeks belief that the natural was good, that bodies were natural and that sex was natural and healthy.

It was healthy and normal for human beings to have sex, to Enjoy it, both men and women, and to not be ashamed of it, even outside of marriage.

The marriage bond was only conventional, the bond that counted was love.

Or alternatively, there was nothing wrong with using one’s body for sexual recreation.

Prior to the 60’s, living together without being married was almost unheard of and absolutely taboo but the counterculture changed that. It became more and more commonplace until, while it is not universally approved, no longer shocks anyone or seems particularly daring or out of the ordinary.

Brigitte Bardot, on the right, was shocking and disreputable to the American middle-class because she was openly sexual and not in the least demure.

QuickTime™ and a TIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor are needed to see this picture.

The sexuality of some women Was so shocking that they were Invisible.

Interracial sex was definitely not okay- it’s “tabu.”

“During the 50’s “92% [of Americans] in the north and 99% in the south approved of laws banning marriage Between whites and non-whites. As late as the mid Sixties, more than half of northern whites and over 3/4 of southern whites still opposed interracial Marriage.” Elaine Tyler May,

Homeward Bound

Law: Did free love work?

Simone: In a way, yes. For a while, yes. But that was mostly Because the physical dangers of sex were at an all-time low.

It was pre-AIDS, the pill had just come out, and penicillin Had pretty much wiped out VD [STD’s]--for the time being.

I think, emotionally speaking, the free-love movement Worked to teach us our limits, and we often learned these The hard way. I mean, I claimed not to be jealous, only To find out the hard way that I was really very jealous, given The right situation. I think that we reached past the limits We would have inherited though, by trying free love. Most People from the tribe that I keep in touch with stilll try to be Generous with their friendships, their affections. But we Have certainly drawn the line in the sand when it comes to “free sex.” It’s just too dangerous to even contemplate These days.

Central issue raised by communes and by free-love: How do you successfully perform social experiments when One still has attitudes, emotions, expectations that are deep Inside one, that can’t easily be expunged or changed, but that Are appropriate for the older conventional situations, not for The newer ones.

Can such experiments be fairly tested?

Robert Mapplethorpe Broke taboos On photographing The nude male Body as a sexual Object as well As by depicting Interracial gay Couples.

• Discovering the beauties and pitfalls of free love didn’t fail, in the sense that an experiment never fails. The process is a success simply because you try it.

The free bikes For several years, Madison had free bikes: They were painted pink, I Think, and anyone could Take one and ride it to Wherever he or she was Going and then leave it For others. An honor System and it worked Well for a while.

Peace & love

• The whole nation of young people discovered that to love was better than to hate, that peace was better than war, and that helping was better than being isolated from the people around you. Not everyone felt this way, of course, but a great many of us did.

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What if they gave a war. . . . . . and nobody came?

War is not healthy for children and other living things.

• The 60’s really expressed the feeling of what the U.S. was founded on--the voice of the people being the government, not the government dictating to the people. I think, through music and film and whatever else, the powers-that-be were persuaded that “Hey we’re on the wrong track here. . .”

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requiem

I have received invaluable lessons through the wisdom of my parents and siblings and the simple philosophies of the 60’s. Good food, clean water, shelter, love, family, children--the soul’s fulfillment---these are the gifts we deserve to inherit and to pass on to future generations. The 60’s taught us that we can reinvent community; they laid the foundations for designing a life that exists and is sustained by cooperating with nature.. . If we are to be true to our love of life, then we need to be very creative and continue to use the tools forged in the 60’s to expand our minds and learn to live.