A Pentagon report on climate change has revealed that we probably should have listened to the hippies in the 60’s instead of waiting till 2007 to begin implementing the renewable energy revolution.
Some analysts predict that the change over to renewable energy from carbon fuels will create 3 to 5 million jobs over the next 5 years.
We interviewed one hippy we found in Indianapolis and asked him what he made of this
recent finding.
“It is amazing really to think about it. We smoke a lot of weed and eat tons of LSD and still we were able to see that humanity was about to reach the end of mother natures rope. Kind of like the peace activists had better intelligence on WMD’s in Iraq than the Bush administration. In the end, We were right.
“It’s nearly as amazing as the fact that the carbon we humans have dumped into the atmosphere in just a mere hundred years took volcanic activity hundreds of thousands of years to produce and the ocean literally millions of years to scrub out of the atmosphere. Then we dig it up and burn it! This is clearly the largest shock that the earths climate system has ever experienced. Neither solar fluctuations nor the earth’s own volcanic activity itself are capable of delivering a shock of this magnitude to earth’s climate system”
Someone said (Don Miguel Ruiz); “We are god dreaming that we are not god” and I agree, “who but god could shock the earth like this? And if we’re not god at all as they (the christians) say, then we are certainly playing god. When in fact we are arrogant, oil burning apes.”
Here at the Mud we thought that was a pretty bold statement so we thought we’d interview
our hippy in Indianapolis for further amusement.
MM: So, Mr. Badweatherrr, it is Badweatherrr with three r’s correct? were would you say it all went wrong?
Badweatherrr: Well, I trace the downfall of man all the way back to the clock. You see, as soon as the clock was invented my boss not only knew that I was late but also how late I was. This resulted in humans creating our own cycles outside the natural life cycles of the earth. The clock is a useful scientific tool which allowed the Egyptians to determine to a fair degree of accuracy the circumference of the earth. Which is clearly wonderful to know, but not essential to our happiness. When the clock began setting the pace rather than the sun and the seasons we began straying seriously from the natural way of life.
A good example of this is having to go to work to an assembly line job doing the same soul crushing, mind numbing job, every day even when it’s blizzarding out. Real common sense would be to stay home on that terrible day and do something that needed doing inside the house. It seems to me that industrial man has sacrificed a whole lot of freedom for comfort and boredom. As much fun as the people of this society have made of our hippie ways, that’s just how we’ll all end up living. And we should have done it sooner rather than later.
MM: So, more recently, where did it all go wrong?
Badweatherrr: One person: G. Gordon Liddy. He was one of the most illustrious people to ever work in Washington. I know I’ll sound like a nut job even talking about G. Gordon Liddy but he’s still kicking as a radio talk show host in LA, just listen to him sometime you’ll know who the nut job is. This guy is quoted as saying that he “admired Hitler greatly” and that he “cut the heads off chickens until he could kill without feeling.” He used dry ice bullets so he could use his favorite weapons to assassinate people and boiled cigars for the nicotine (one drop of pure nicotine will kill twelve people) and coated his bullets with the resulting paste so even a flesh wound was fatal. The guy should have stayed a freak in the barnyard…. instead he became one of the early architects of the drug war.
He was essential to the process of the Nixon administration figuring out that they could
drive a wedge through the middle of the Vietnam War protesters (which was really an out growth of the civil rights movement) and even if we did stop the bloodshed in Vietnam the Nixonians set the stage for the next thirty years of lies and misinformation which you now can see the results of. I call it the Nixonian split, dividing the progressive left from their real roots.
So after thirty years of laughing at hippies and their natural ways and throwing them in prison for a weed, hippies are still right after all. Example: Organic food is the fastest growing segment of the food economy! Renewable energyinvestments are about to go through the roof! Solar, wind, geothermal, bio fuels, all these things were promoted thirty years ago by hippies and marginalized by the media, are now about to spring onto the market as viable means of producing electricity. All of it marginalized because after all, what could a bunch of brain damaged acid casualties possibly know?
Here’s how it works.
I was going to city council meetings in East Moline because of the proposed building of the largest hog slaughtering facility on the planet. There were more than 45 people there and many heart felt and compelling stories told as to why this was a bad idea. I had done my own research for about three days on meat packing facilities and came to the meeting well prepared with a concise statement which ended up being the only citizen statement aired. The media didn’t show that there were almost 50 people, and they didn’t tell their story. Personally, I think they used my face to marginalize our message. As long as they could make the public believe that it was the same old hippy dippy peace and love crowd (not to be taken seriously) then they could proceed with business as usual knowing that no one takes their opposition seriously.
MM: People have felt that Hippies were against business and that capitalism and democracy being the same that therefore hippies were un-American. Is this true?
Badweatherrr: I think that hippies are people that have “gone native”. I also think back to a time in American history were a bunch of early founding fathers got together and tossed a lot of tea overboard in Boston Harbor. I think that it was stupid to dress up as Indians, but maybe it is simply the influence of Native thought even then upon American thinking at the time. At any rate, the act of tossing the tea was in fact an anti corporate agenda. The East India Co. was unfairly dominating our political process and we responded by refusing to pay for the tea. I think that hippies are nearly the only group of people to take to heart the message in the Constitution and bill of rights and the real Peoples history of America in a truly meaningful way. We attempt to live our lives in meaningful ways that actively reject corporate control of our lives and our
politics. By stopping watching television, and embracing voluntary simplicity and living “in community” throwing corporations out of our lives one by one until we feel free, we reclaim reality, and embrace a diverse future of possibilities and opportunities. The bottom line here is that, to actively resist corporate homogenization of public discourse is abut a continuance of the progressive politics which form the very foundation of America in the first place. We began extremely leary of corporate control and had very strict rules concerning their formation and mandatory disolution upon their stated tasks completion.
MM: That sounds kind of arrogant, what about all those flag waving Christians out there that think hippies are the devil incarnate?
Badweatherrr: I’ve been told that I look a lot like Charlie Manson too but in the end, we were the ones that suggested living in a more agrarian fashion close to the land and in harmony with nature and at peace with other nations, people, races, etc. Besides, I think that our peace and love attitude is completely in keeping with the teachings of Jesus of nazareth.
MM: Incidently, what is the significance to the three r’s in your name?
Badweatherrr: The three r’s are of course: Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle.
MM:I have to admit, it does seem that hippies have a few things figured out. How can this possibly be?
Badweatherrr: I personally stopped watching television when I was 17. Hippies tend to gather in groups and play music for entertainment. Live music. This means that we have to actually get together… there may be dancing and smoking and drinking and sex and love and well, you get the picture. Tune in, Turn on, and Drop out was tim leary’s message. Not that I subscribe to everything he said. I think Tim was off the deep end there towards the end, but we still love him for all that he did. I know, he’s part of why hippies got marginalized but he was stilll essential to the evolution of our subculture. As is being ignored by our society for 30 years. I think that we just think more like Native Americans. We require meaning in our lives and our work. We color outside the lines a lot. We are probably mostly ADHD, hunter gatherers, wanderers. That is the natural way. Most indigenous cultures and most animals migrate with the seasons, we should to.
MM: Any closing comments?
Badweatherrr: I always knew we were right about this, but till I read that Pentagon report I didn’t know how right we were!
MM: We really want to thank you for taking the time to talk with us today Mr. Badweatherrr, or can we just call you Bad?
Badweatherrr: You can call me whatever you like, as long as you been doin’ it right!
Peace Now!
I realized how lucky I was that I’d decided to ride the bus instead of drive a car. Had I been driving a car, I would never have been drawn into this world that is both new and like re-entering my childhood all over again. I thought about the sound of the ice cracking as I walked over it all day.
I need a significant amount of chaos (or randomness) in my life in order to feel creative. These random patterns in the muddy sidewalkcall to this need in me.
I was into thisscene because of the way the light was at my back and there was such a deep contrast between the lighted side of the building and the sidewalk. This picture doesn’t do any justice at all to what I remember of it.
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