Written by: gfesadmin on March 11, 2013

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Why I didn’t join the Hippies in San Francisco

Nation of Rebels by Heath and Potter resonated with me in a deep way.  They examine a litany of countercultural experience and show how they’ve failed to achieve their presupposed purposes.  I’ve had countercultural times and phases in my life and I was excited to view their conclusions, but found them to be what most of us have thought – that a system of rules, even if coerced is needed, as well as forms of punishment or enforcement of the rules.

The first time for this rural Kansas boy to be rebellious was in college when I spent a week with some subversive-type friends in Houston.  We sat around the house (they were both out of jobs) and listened to the Beatles, exploring how life would be if we only followed the philosophy proposed by the British group.  I began to see after those long five days what the authors mentioned, in that “we tear down systems and rules but fail to replace them with anything of significance.”

Later, while in seminary in San Francisco, I spent time in the Haight-Ashbury district hoping to make the world a better place, but instead, only found older, used, worn-out hippies who had no agenda, but as Heath and Potter put it – “just wanting the right to party!”

Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan leader, died the night before I wrote this blog.  In his attempt to use counter-cultural rebellion in his country, it only exacerbated the problems he hoped to solve. In Heath’s words, “By rejecting any proposal that stops short of a total transformation of human consciousness and culture”, they wind up hurting those they wanted to help.

While in London this past week, my daughter and I toured Shakespeare’s Globe Theater.  Our guide was an actor himself and was excited to tell us everything about the culture and life of that time.  While sitting in the theater, he explained about how clothes were so important in Shakespeare’s day, indicating who was royal, or a tradesman etc.  As he we speaking, four grade school classes came in for their field trips.  He went on to point out how that it is still true today, noting one school over the other – as their clothes and even color of uniforms showed which social class there were part of, even in today’s London.  But counter-culturists, the book says, have a way of denying even this attempt of uniformity – raising a sock, or the shininess of their shoes.  Uniforms and other forms of authoritarian expressions of uniformity might provide identification, but conformity, no.

In the end, as much as we try to globalize and unify, there will always be the “fact of pluralism”.  As my gay Democrat son living in Chicago has nothing in common with my older Republican son serving in the Air Force, they and we need to learn to disagree, not superficially but deep disagreements in the most important aspects of life – and continue on.  This would include religion.  Perhaps if we could agree to disagree with others who don’t hold our faith values, love would become more prominent and we wouldn’t experience another thousand years as Heath describes in which “Christians have been working the “love your neighbor” angle for two-thousand years but without much success at creating a utopian society.”

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