Hippies

by Gary Gautier

Abraham Lincoln once said, ‘Give me six hours to cut down a tree and I’ll spend the first four hours sharpening the axe.’

It wasn’t the pot that brought the foot soldiers down. No, it was the protests for social justice and against the war, it was the new definitions of family and community, that’s what terrified the Man. He could see his world crumbling faster and faster between 1967 and 1970. Rag could feel compassion for those people, too. The ones who saw their world caving in.

“Not good at all. Gave it up. I used to be good. Or I used to try to be good. But people aren’t meant to be good. That’s too high a bar for people. You try to be good, you’re failing all the time, frustrated, then you get grumpy and bitter. Then you’re nothing but a pain in the ass to everybody around you when all you wanted was to be good. No, I’m not good and I’m not bad. I’m done with all that. And you know what? It’s liberating. You can’t imagine anything more liberating to the human spirit than giving up on good and bad.”

Maybe that’s what life is about – not about direction but about willfully losing direction.

“The desire of addiction fights as hard inside a body as the desire for true happiness. And addiction can dress in the finest costumes. ‘Take me and you’ll be happy,’ it says. But it’s a false happiness, a selfish pleasure that grates, not the happiness that soothes.

“What is a life anyway, one life? There is no one life. Just a tangled mess of lives.”

Maybe it’s not about changing the world. It’s about something inside.