For decades I watched from the sides and then by a lucky chance had an opportunity to make a move to become a part of the Hippy Movement

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The Planet Should Not Have to Die

Because One Stage of Human Culture is Dying

or

Not So Funny, Where is My Mind and My Money?

( A hippy tale with a possible happy ending )

As a child I put my trust in the word-pedalers, those who propagandized me to believe. They spouted the verbal symbols of language and I made my child-brain quiet for them to format and reformat ( I absorbed both true culture and cultural propaganda ). As an adult I now know .....The word is not the meaning behind it, and the map is not the territory, and a wealth of words, Is not a wealth of love/wisdom/knowledge in the heart and mind.

And those who reformatted my brain, once had their brains reformatted, and we are all followers following followers, with few real leaders. And we are about to follow each other off of a cliff. Spiritual leaders there may be, but minus me, minus me as the leader of myself, that makes me still lost ( I am the person at the helm of my life, I am not a puppet of culture. I as an individual make my own personal culture and then share it with the world, taking of its culture, reciprocally, for what serves my own integrity and survival ).

Paper and electronic digits, this is money. It is equally able to be lost in abstraction as words. I tried when a young adult to buy common land with others, a place to escape to, I wanted it, if the big system failed. But fellow citizens mind-raped by the establishment, each in a cultural-mind-freeze, that was all there was then. We were devoid of any group interaction in the 1960s, except for the hippies. I watched with deep admiration and wanted to be one and go out on the land but I was poor and alone and trapped in the city. The hippies were naive and adolescent to a degree, as well as persecuted. But their movement has had some effect. Still, there was and still is no real extended family in human culture available to most humans.

Social/political chaos there was, and back then I had some 60's hippy hope, but it went underground. And now decades later, since the 60's, and its hippy movement that did not last, the monster has gotten bigger, a political monster too big and too far off with mega-corruption growing ever more apocalyptic. Now all you hear is rhetoric and word-make-believe and more and more funny money, spouted from pulpits and podiums and prisons called schools, phoney stuff. All that rhetoric and noise is louder and more chaotic and is now killing freedom as never before, the letter shapes and word shapes and paper shapes and TV bites, all meanings are abstracted to near nonsense now.

I might have figured, back in the 60's, that I could translate the paper-said-to-be-wealth, back to real wealth, later ( put my money in the bank or stock market ). I might have handed all my personal power over to the paper-wealth-people to play with.......... ( and they played with it until it was gone ), I too might have handed over my life force and my life wealth, because a "cultural they" told me to, but I was so poor I saw it .... the culture is dying and we need a new culture. How did I know? It was killing me and for no reason. Culture is human-made not divine, ( there have only been a few messiahs ). We need to reinvent culture.

It still seems to me ...., the best wealth might be love in small personal local community, where trust of someone besides myself might make it, make it possible for a system going past the current madness. Current cultural madness is all there is and even that is dying ( cultures, like everything in creation, sometimes die ). A system there is but it is as thin as the paper-wealth and as hollow as the word rhetoric it is based on. I have always wanted some people-wealth to take the place of my little paper-wealth. Why does paper and abstract symbols mean wealth, and people mean nothing?

Or I might have put some of my paper money ( what little there was ), into a postage stamp plot of planet, not enough to maintain me, as a cell of planethood, but only as a cell of prisonhood, But I wanted a human family as well, not just land, for feast and friendship and true fraternity ( I continued to think and to plan ).

I continued to wish I had a piece of planet, big enough to put friends on and me on, and I wished we could all drop out, hippy happy survival of the big-system-death, an anarchic seed past plutocratic greed. I wanted to make my own system, and make a small viable organ of planethood, Mini-Planet made up of human-planet-cells like me.

I am no longer giving over my brain to be reformatted, by abstractions based on abstractions and empty words, spouted by people who were once spouted to, from the pompous prattle of the podium, my ears and theirs presumed to have no mind between them. Empty words and empty promises, and all my power might have been stolen had I any. As it was a chance happening finally gave me some money anyway.

I eventually did get a piece of land, ( as luck would have it ), with a stream and a sunbeam, a piece of land where I can make a stand, maybe I can find some friends who can make a plan, social/political construct and a legal contract, formal legal land trust format so no one will be a doormat. That way I will not be stranded, when the dying system is largely disbanded.

I have not found my people yet. I hear it is a partial ego death to run a few acres of land communally and not kill each other. I may find out some day. I figure the worst we can do is fail to be egalitarian and have a failed attempt at community and have one bully steal the show. Heck, we have that already. Nothing new there. The culture at large does that. The worst I can do is what they do. Almost anything I end up doing is probably going to be better than what I see in the dying culture I live in now.

THE END

( And Maybe a Beginning )

Authors Bio:
I am a hippy that never dropped out. I have held on to impossible idealism and will not give up. I think the human race is a ticking time bomb and we are at the last tick. So what is the good of slow careful pragmatism that allows time for it all to happen with less than miraculous speed ? Right now we need near-impossible idealism or we need to go extinct so we can stop killing our planet. Other life forms may need it after we have almost destroyed it. Humans seem to be a very clever but unwise species that is not making it. At the very least we could go down with a little dignity. We have no planetary culture with both head and heart. And our numbers are so great we must have that. See you next lifetime on another planet incarnated in another species, I guess.