NOTE: Nobody seemed interested in this clip and blurb, so I’ve inserted a couple of images from the video clip to see if it stirs interest.
Since back in the 60s in California when I was a dirty hippie communist, counter-cultural, anti-war protester, student radical, and draft-resister, who advocated free speech and practiced free love, nothing has fundamentally changed about the human organism. Truth be told, nothing as fundamentally changed about us in the past half million years. I’ve accumulated some years since the halcyon vacuole of several years in the 60s, but I’m still the same indignant, shit-stirring warrior I was. My outrage and great disappointment simply manifests itself differently now.
The planet is a lot more wrecked now than it was back then, but don’t sweat it, we could never have managed it differently, it’s a numbers game. The wrecking ball encoded in our DNA makes it so. But back then in the privileged West we were living high off the fossil fuel hog and ardent American hegemony without appreciating the downstream consequences—even us young folks who lived the “Summer of Love” and bonked our brains loose. The thin veil of hope that shielded our cores from our species’ innate existential angst enabled a small minority of us who were able to break free from our cultural chains to express the pure joy and exuberance of life. By my reckoning, the golden age of wishful thinking lasted between early 1965 and the close of 1968 before our true natures burnt through the thin membrane of idealistic bliss. Then we were back to business-as-usual. Smart “hippies” became smart businessmen transforming the colorful, and very marketable images we created into very fat bank accounts.
Music was the hub of life and the conduit for communication of social memes for us back then. Before Spotify and live streaming on our smartphones, we actually composed and PLAYED music ourselves in gatherings of all kinds. What was disingenuously called “Folk Music” was where you could find out what was happening. An icon of the era was Pete Seeger. His song, “Where Have All The Flowers Gone” inspired today’s short video clip. He penned it in 1955 and recorded this around 1960, or so. It just popped into my head.
As any of you who have followed Aboard Ron know, my optimism, if I ever had the tiniest drop, has long since evaporated. That doesn’t mean I’ve thrown in the towel. Quite the contrary, but there’s a pre-recorded message that for decades has been running in a feedback loop that shouts: “BRACE FOR IMPACT!”
