Just sitting here listening to Richie Havens and the song that got Lou Gossett Jr. out of a run-down single room apartment (he wrote Handsome Johnny) …
I understand that Mother Culture is whispering constantly in our ears that the day before yesterday is old news, that nothing good was discovered or done before the glorious today that is our modern world. And I understand that free love has a price that most are not willing to pay. And I understand, like in the Sufi teaching story, that this culture is like a new water supply that makes you forget, and only those who have hoarded the old water remember the way it was before – and to avoid alienation and aloneness, they too start drinking of the new water, and thereby lose the past as well …
But I don’t understand why, if there were so many who had such great realizations, why they didn’t actually form a new society. Why they (when they “grew up”) bought into this one, thinking that a program against stupidity would take the place of a culture wherein stupidity is not encouraged. Where have all the flowers gone? Were they only annuals?
