Dropping Out

Looking back 40 years to 1965, I'm amazed at how much we knew then, how accurate our judgments were, and how much we forgot along the way.Lyndon Johnson was just beginning to ratchet up the insanity of the Vietnam War, and we had only a vague idea of how close that lunatic, John F Kennedy, had taken the world to obliteration. But I and most of the people I hung out with at the time had enough information to know that we couldn't possibly co-exist with the madness attempting to pass itself off as our politico-socio-economic system.

We were very sure of two things: first, that the only way to live in America was to completely drop out of American society (to the extent that that's possible), and secondly, that the political system, society, and economy in which we were living wasn't the product of any human endeavor. Rather, it was a machine, and it was out of control. It was, at bottom, a war machine.

Some went on welfare. Some became musicians or artists. Some pooled their resources and bought little plots of land, keeping goats and a few chickens, and planting vegetable and marijuana gardens. But eventually, nearly everyone forgot what we were about. People got married, had families, and needed money. Quite a few of us sold out our ideals and went to work for "the man," as we used to say. We went through the Carter, Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton years convincing ourselves that life in the shadow of the Pentagon and the Chevron/Exxon/Texaco/Mobil behemoth is normal, even desirable.

Then came Bush II, Iraq, and the rising tide of American fascism, and I woke up from my 30 years' sleep. I wonder how many of my old compatriots have done the same.

A good idea, if it's based on sound reasoning and sound observation, and if it's truthful, never disappears. It might fade away for awhile, but it will eventually come back around again.If you're an American, I would strongly encourage you to drop out of this sick society, whose rulers are corporate buccaneers, whose culture is advertising jingles, and "whose fingers are ten armies," in the words of Allen Ginsburg. I'm not going to get into specifics about what dropping out consists of -- not in this post anyway.

As for revolution, there's really no need of that. Just as Nixon, the world's greatest eavesdropper, fell because he bugged himself, the current crew of gangsters, possibly the most destructive scrum of thugs the world has ever seen, is about to destroy themselves and their entire war machine as well. They're on the verge of accomplishing this by mortgaging the country to oriental, mostly Chinese bankers, and by their refusal or inability to come to grips with the great oncoming crisis of our age, the coming petroleum supply crisis.