If you were given $1,000, how would you spend it?

http://iraqmoratorium.org/

On Friday, September 21st, I received a link related to the website above with information about Third Friday [of every month]. Third Friday is a nationwide call to impose an Iraq Moratorium; to stop the war. We are all called on to do something towards ending this ungodly, unjust, and economically insane war. This is my piece for this month’s Third Friday. Besides, I watched Florida’s Ros-Lehtinen on the Congressional channel that evening and think we can do better since she was born in time to grow up in the golden years of the hippie era.

You might ask why I’m connecting a present-day Congressional representative and war with a time when people refused to put up with political decisions that led to destructive military events, since so many years intervene and Iraq doesn’t feel like Vietnam. There’s a lesson in what happened in Vietnam, which needs to translate to today’s wars. For more than ten years I have listened to some people say that hippies were dirty, disgraceful, drugged out, up to no good, and prone to communist, socialist, or perhaps leftist views. So why should the United States (US) government listen to a bunch of hippies?

When hippies were most prevalent, between 1960 and the late 1970’s, society in the US underwent substantial change. Sure, there were hippies who simply drifted along in a marijuana haze, but a lot of long-haired folks wearing bell-bottomed jeans, open-neck, flowered shirts, and long strands of plant-seed beads around their necks contributed volumes to understanding our American lives, the lives of others outside of the US, personal responsibility, and the intricate web of connections between people and our environment. Not to forget the incredible musical evolution that began with such bands as Big Brother and the Holding Company; Country Joe McDonald and The Fish; Ravi Shankar; Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young; the Grateful Dead; The Band; and artists like Janis Joplin, Arlo Guthrie, Santana, Jimi Hendrix, and Joan Baez. Today’s music simply wouldn’t be if it weren’t for those times and people.

During the youth movement that bloomed from beatniks to hipsters and eventually into the hippie generation, US society gained useful knowledge and experience with clean and sustainable energy, alternative lifestyles, healthy eating, political activism, and a sexual revolution that hasn’t yet abated. We also benefited from insights through books such as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by award-winning journalist, Ken Kesey. He indulged in acid trips as a test subject for a CIA financed project named MKULTRA in Menlo Park, California in 1959. In 1999, he claimed he was too old to be a beatnik and too young to be a hippie. Kesey was born in 1939.

Every now and then one, or more, of my new friends, wherever I happen to be living at the time, points out that I am much like a hippie. I’m not offended by their observation. But, I don’t consider myself a hippie, either. Usually, my response is to dredge up an oft used refrain, “My friends from way back used to call me mellow yellow.” They really did know me.

But, I am incredibly out of context now. How could my friends from America’s most southern state, many of whom aren’t US citizens and don’t have first-hand experience with the sixties in the US, really know what hippie means, and recognize that I am not a hippie? I acknowledge that I do have some of the characteristics that those wild, flower-loving, war-hating, tree-hugging, long-haired hippie-freaks embodied.

When I was born in California in 1961, there were plenty of hippies around. My parents had hippie friends, hippies lived in our neighborhood, and you could find hippies at the beach playing guitar, making sand candles, drinking wine, making wind music by blowing just right into the neck of empty and partially empty wine bottles, talking about Vietnam, and plotting political change. Yeah, I was there, too. Sand candles are very cool, by the way.

But, I didn’t drop acid, I was just a baby. Babies can’t be hippies. At least not until they come of age, smoke a joint, drop some hits, burn their draft cards, or the American flag, stick a flower in their hair, or into the tip of a gun barrel with a cop at the other end staring you down from within their protective police flak and standing squarely behind a protective riot shield. I never did that.

Now and then I get a little nostalgic over the things I didn’t do, because I was a baby. Then I realize that if I’d been born earlier, I would probably have ended up mind-blown, barefoot, pregnant, living in a commune, growing vegetables for everyone, on the lam, no potential for a degree, and never having had real opportunity to follow my heart, live in many beautiful places, had good love without child, be free to go where needed to make ends meet, and develop friendships with people from all walks of life. I have grown vegetables for everyone in my sphere of influence. But, I don’t think that makes me a hippie.

The events in my life that I can legitimately feel nostalgic about were probably those of a hippie, too. In 1963, my family and I were celebrating my younger brother’s birthday. Yeah, I remember that day. There was a dark cloud over the room. I’ll never get the image out of my mind. It was little bro’s first birthday on November 22nd, the day our president, John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas, Texas. He died and our house had a dark cloud inside hovering over the birthday party. For a long time that cloud hung over the whole country. We had lost a great political leader who listened to us and acted on our behalf when we said we wanted to bring the troops home.

In the early 1970’s, my mom and I spent a lot of time together. She was one of the Brownie’s hosts, or leaders. Never was sure what to call her. I wore the usual Brownie uniform and did the usual Brownie things, but I never considered wanting to go beyond and become a Bluebird, or Girl Scout, though I know that was the objective for all good Brownies. Mom and I also spent time together protesting the Vietnam War. My sister, four years older and seemingly indifferent to family activities, bought a silver POW, or MIA bracelet. The soldier’s name I knew, but can’t recall now. I don’t know whether he was found, dead or alive. Little bro was a Cub Scout. He wore a peace sign pinned to his uniform and was banned from the Scouts. Dad protested and got John reinstated.

We were a typical American family doing typical American things and we stopped the war. Mom, dad, my sister, my brother, me and hundreds of thousands of other Americans stopped the Vietnam War.

Maybe when I am really old I’ll look back on that as one of my great accomplishments. For now, I cherish memories of sitting on one of our home-made quilts on summer grass at a small park near downtown Santa Barbara in California. We sang. Every voice, every woman, every man, every child, we all sang. We sang until the war was ended. Pete Seeger is one of the great anti-war song writers and we sang his songs with enough conviction to end an unjust war; his “Where have all the flowers gone?” still makes my eyes tear.

Where have all the flowers gone?

Long time passing …

Where have all the soldiers gone?

Gone to graveyards every one …

Where have all the graveyards gone?

Covered with flowers every one

When will we ever learn?

When will we ever learn?

I’m thinking we never will learn. War is as old as humanity itself. People will always behave based on emotional stimuli. We will continue to feel hurt and act jealously when the person we love acts on their feelings for another. Parents will always be proud of their child’s accomplishments and will make their pride known, even if it makes them look a little silly when they plaster multiple copies of the same “my child is an honor roll student” on one car. I think that war will probably plague us into eternity because we are human and are prone to acting on our emotions, rather than examining our feelings and acting rationally. I used to have hope for humankind regarding war. But, now I feel like I’m just going through the motions when I write a letter to my representatives about how awful, ugly, unjust, inappropriate, and economically destructive the wars of today are. Since we emerged from the politically potent days of hippies, more people have moved toward the center of the political spectrum. There are fewer dissidents and radicals among us now. Which is why, now and then, I tune the television into the latest happenings in Washington, DC. I’m searching for some semblance of hippie activism in the face of today’s wars in the mid-east.

On September 21, 2007, I watched Florida Congressional Representative, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, pose a series of questions to a former Ambassador during the Clinton administration. The Ambassador had made some statements soon after the initial invasion in Iraq and it sounded like he was supportive of the war at the time. Most people associated with politics on the Hill were.

Ros-Lehtinen asked some poignant, well researched questions. The Ambassador didn’t answer most of the questions. Instead, he did the politic thing and rambled on at length about one or two points of the five or six she had posed. He didn’t answer the most important question. And, she let him get away with it. I find watching politicians in powerful positions waste great opportunities for unearthing truth to be painful. My adrenaline spikes, my muscles tense, and I want to jump on the next plane to go knock on their door to find out why their spine is made of jelly. What happened to using good old political clout? I wanted to know the answer to the most important question she posed. And she didn’t use her position of authority as a member of the US House Committee on Foreign Affairs to get the answer. I really wanted to know if he thought that with the continued trend of waning support for the war in Iraq if it was appropriate for politicians to continue supporting this war, especially considering the incredible financial burden. Are we really that great a nation that we are willing to risk everything? I wanted to know, and she let him off the hook.

I was a politician once, for four years, actually. I’m pretty sure that means I’m not a hippie. I’m not even a Green Party member, though they did endorse me in my bid for re-election. But, the National Rifle Association did, too, as did the Gay and Lesbian crowd, even though I’m a heterosexual. Had I been in Ros-Lehtinen’s seat that day and I had listened to the Ambassador skirt the questions, I would not have relented. Citizens who watched me wax politic in Cotati, California would support my statement here. I know because some of them got really mad at me since I wouldn’t relent on the hard and critical questions. That didn’t stop me, though. I stood up and faced small-town political colleagues and pressed for answers on the questions that needed to be answered. That was my job. People voted for me because I asked important questions and didn’t let the answers get swept under the rug. That earned me a smear campaign and a friend of mine was assaulted by a buddy of the Mayor for standing up for his community’s rights. My friend would not let me back down on the issue and we finally got the answers we sought. That earned the Mayor and his thugs some egg on their faces. The hard questions have to be posed and the answers have to come forth. The events of today are too critical to let anything less occur and the world deserves no less than truth inspiring questions leading to full and honest answers.

Those are the types of questions that have to be asked of our representatives and we can not let ourselves be convinced otherwise, nor can we sit back, pretending to be satisfied while we thank the person skirting the answers. Had I been Ros-Lehtinen when the Ambassador finished his skirting, I’d have pulled myself back up to the microphone and said, I am sorry, Ambassador, could you please respond to my question directly. Let me rephrase it for you.

Do you think, knowing what you know now, that this war is still worthy of the blood of our young men and women, the wasting of hundreds of billions of dollars annually, the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi people, the lives and limbs of all the affected Iraqi children, the incredible environmental and infrastructure damage, and the tremendous loss of good will from other nations for the United States? Do you really think, Sir that this war is still worth our bulldog-like attention?

At least I feel confident about some things. I am not a hippie. I am more than that. Yesterday’s hippies are also. That was what was really cool about the golden days of hippies – we learned, we grew, and we implored of ourselves and others that we do the best we possibly could. Whether doing good is to eat food not sprayed with chemicals; to love our community, the world and all of earth’s inhabitants, or to demand absolute honesty of our representatives, we will always know that we have done our best, and learned from the process.