fasten the seat belt on your handbasket

Yes Buddhism was all the rage during my hippie days. Indian mysticism was okay, hell any mysticism was okay, but Hinduism never caught on and I think it was because of that caste thing which sounded a lot like racism, which of course we abhorred.

Of course you know I hated all that crap so I never got into it, but I suspect that most people never got beyond a few snappy phrases which sounded all peace and love. It was exotic and it was a way to be a little religious without being Christian. Christianity was just soooo straight.

Oh and there was chanting. Chanting was big in some circles. When I first arrived in Berkeley there were these little old Chinese ladies in pockets along Telegraph Avenue. As I said, I was not of that bent, and my girlfriend had warned me so I steered clear of them. But other unsuspecting hippies on their way to purchase some pot would find themselves accosted by a knot of these ladies. Oh well, how cool, actual Asian Buddhists, oh yes I believe in peace and love, oh yes, the universalism of all and all that far out stuff, oh I’d love to visit your Buddhist temple. And then the trap was shut, because it turned out there was a bus just around the corner that would be leaving in a quarter of an hour. It’s hard to be rude to a little old Asian lady, so they would have you standing in a rounded up group while they went out for more prey, and when they had enough the bus would roll up, and the hapless captive hippies, losing their buzz, would be packed up in the bus and taken to the temple where they would get their very own unique chant, and would be relieved of whatever scant money might have been in their pockets. It was quite a racket.

I kind of believe we have been going to hell in a handbasket ever since the industrial revolution. Well there are many good things that came from it, cures for diseases and this very machine I am using to communicate with you. There are some who also decry how nice bucolic lives hanging around the fishing hole and singing folk songs were transformed into twelve hour days of slaving, along with your children, in filthy factories under mean bosses. But you know those people flocked to the city from the country to take those jobs, nobody forced them to do that. And I part a little with my liberal brethren on sweatshops. Nobody makes anybody work in them and when they are shut down all the workers are still poor and now they don’t have even their cruddy jobs.

But it’s pollution, overpopulation, and global warming that bother me. If we had stayed in the middle ages we could have gone that way forever, well until the sun began to run out of steam, but the way it is now, we are headed for some big crunch which we may or may not survive. I don’t think you believe this but I do, and we can discuss this later.

Probably not for Europe, but for the USA, times after WW II were just great. Our factories were pumping out goods that everybody wanted, nobody worried about the smoke, you could drop out of high school at anytime and get a good paying job in a factory. And almost like people today look forward to those Apple trinkets, we looked eagerly towards what our scientists would invent next. Cars that you didn’t have to drive, jet packs, moving sidewalks everywhere. There used to be a series in the comic strips that predicted what the future would be like, and everybody was all, oh I can’t wait.

And then somewhere, maybe in the late sixties that turned to, thank God I will be dead before that happens. Some blamed Kennedy’s assassination, some the unpopular war, some the Beatles, some all those hordes of chanting hippies. Remember Ms Stark and her proselytizing to the Sophomore class about Silent Spring. What a batty old lady I thought at the time.

So in short I think that our progress in technology is a two edged sword, and what little we have advanced in love for our fellow man is only because we have full stomachs and time on our hands, and if you took that away we would be back to savagery just like that. And, speaking of death, all those fine thoughts we accrued in our lifetimes goes out like a candle once we are gone, and our offspring are born as savages.