Category: Cultural Commentary

Perhaps the Most Beautiful Ideal in Human History.

I can’t find the video now, but YouTuber Parkrose Permaculture recently mentioned visiting a historic hippie commune and expressed how transformative the experience was.

You bet it was. The Counterculture was perhaps the most beautiful ideal, vision, and dream ever conceived by humanity. When John Lennon’s song Imagine can bring the audience of a VFW post to tears — and it did — you get an idea of just how powerfully a truly beautiful idea can seize your soul and never let go.

I cannot even look at photos of Woodstock without being sent into a week-long, wistful yearning to see such beauty again someday. It is that beautiful.

I can testify firsthand, because I was radically transformed by the same wondrous vision nearly twenty years later. It caused me to face my “mid-life crisis” at 28 years of age.

It completely revolutionized, dare I say replaced my entire value system. And I never went back.

What lit the fuse in my soul

Upon stumbling across the movie Atoll Life in Kiribati on PBS in my 20s, I had to record it on my Sony Betamax. And I watched it. Again, and again. I couldn’t stop dreaming of how badly I wanted that way of life.

The simple, some would say primitive, way of life is something that I longed for even as a child: a closer-to-nature world with a more intimate community and a way of life that depended only on one’s own hands rather than requiring money as if money were a fourth basic biological need.

And then I found the Counterculture

Driven by the now inextinguishable yearning for a Kiribati life, a place much more attainable began catching my eye.

I and two coworkers who lived in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley began carpooling to work in Torrance. Every now and then, we would take Topanga Canyon rather than the stressful, crawling 405 freeway.

Each time that I passed an inconspicuous sign that read Elysium Fields, the curiosity about the nudist resort began to mount until the inevitable happened.

My first visit

When I finally entered and took their membership orientation, I realized that I had wandered into a full 1960s hippie counterculture environment. Even the music in the orientation video sent happy tears pouring down my cheeks.

My devotion to Elysium was instantaneous. I was now possessed by the unending compulsion to begin changing my way of life so that I could spend as much time there as possible.

It became me — and transformed me

Almost immediately I went from short-tempered to calm, from intense to gentle, able to inject an air of calm into almost any situation and defuse it.

In an instant, I recognized the value of time in our lives. I realized that time is irreplaceable; the timespan of our lives is finite, and lost or wasted time is gone forever. It was then that I coined my personal motto: “You can always make more money, but you can never make more time.”

A permanent part of me

The world has changed. Elysium, sadly, has been gone for 25 years, and nude recreation today is a shadow of its Counterculture heyday. The political Left since 1992 has been in a race with the political Right to see who can be the most Puritanical, and today nearly every square inch of uncovered human skin has been sexualized.

But nothing can undo the transformation of my soul and my values. Only the yearning and dissatisfaction resulting from American culture’s drift further and further from that idea has returned.

Today my purpose in life is 1) to prevent and resist further erosion of our culture’s valuation of freedom of choice, and 2) by so doing, preserve and enhance the possibility that a renaissance of the Counterculture’s love of freedom and tension-free intimacy and self-expression can return someday.

I have a feeling in my soul that I may see that someday arrive, in the years that I have left. Our soil is fertile.

Born in the late 1950s, I came of age in the mid-morning of the women’s movement. As a living, breathing, puzzling teenage conglomeration of old fashioned values, geekiness, and a passionate embrace of sexual liberation, I was alive to witness feminism’s rise to ascendancy during the assertively freedom-seeking energy of the 1970s.

But one source of so many of my life regrets is my predilection for embracing a movement a decade or more after it had peaked. You see, I can also be reactionary; I have sometimes come to embrace movements only after years of balking at them, and feminism was one of them.

My contradictory youth

In the 1980s, while I eagerly embraced ’60s Counterculture sexual liberation and the expansion of women’s rights, I shortsightedly found the feminist movement‘s emphasis on abortion off-putting. Empathy being a strong, innate part of my being, I was driven to want to protect babies, both unborn and born. For several years, I was anti-abortion.

You see, I was politically very clueless in my youth. I paid no attention to politics. Little did I know that I was about the only person who based her anti-abortion views on actual empathy for babies and not on misogynist religious dictates.

I was a feminist at heart, but one who questioned some of the approaches of the movement. If that makes sense, right?

Called to active duty for women’s rights

Fast forward to today. After decades of American society believing that women’s rights were a done deal, never to be undone again, along came the 45th presidency, and two Supreme Court appointments later, the Constitutional protections that my generation (and Generation X) had counted on were suddenly dead and gone. Almost all of our basic rights now lay unprotected against malicious, malevolent legislative attack.

Curled up in my bed with the current issue of Ms. magazine on my stalwartly pro-choice lap and a three year prepaid membership in the National Organization for Women under my garter, for perhaps the first time in my life I am entering a critical, relevant sociopolitical movement in its reinvigorated beginning rather than hitching my devotion to it after it had already run out of momentum.

And it makes me feel young again. But this time, my new youth is powered by the wisdom of age.

Those of us who came of age during the height of the Sexual Revolution, otherwise known as the Best Times in American History, Like Evah, looked upon the 1950s with disdain. The 1950s were scorned as puritanical, uptight, and repressed. Breastfeeding was frowned upon, open breastfeeding was unthinkable, and we spoke of menstrual periods in coded language like “a visit from Grandma.”

The Sexual Revolution of the late 1960s and 1970s rebelled against that with vigor, and rebel, did we ever. Pushing against sexual repression together with the rising feminist movement, we propelled the United States into a realm of liberty and free personal expression that it had never seen before.

And then came the 1990s.

What Happened?

Concession by tiny concession, Democrats in legislative chambers began surrendering that newfound love of sexual and expressive liberty in a misguided effort to placate a nascent social conservative movement. In a shocking betrayal of the Sexual Revolution, President Bill Clinton fired the incomparable Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders for merely stating a simple and obvious fact about masturbation. And American culture began to body-shame men who merely showed the amount of skin that the 1950s considered normal for males.

By the year 2000, any male who dared show as much skin as Lloyd Bridges in the 1960s TV series Sea Hunt suffered brutal ridicule and shaming that was heretofore never dreamed possible.

The Fifties, only Worse

But today, nearly all men wear long pants in the pool or at the beach, euphemistically called “board shorts,” and many wear shirts in the water as well. Any man wearing Lloyd Bridges’ trunks is safely assumed to be visiting from overseas. What in the hell happened to the body acceptance of the 1970s?

Today, American culture has become so Puritanical that even the 1950s appear liberated in comparison. The only demographic today that seems to be keeping body acceptance alive is … wait for it … we in the Pride community.

Liberty is like muscle; neglect it, take it for granted, and liberty will atrophy and fall into disuse. Over the course of a few decades liberty will not be valued anymore. Liberty becomes casually disposable.

And that’s where we’re at.