see, Richard, we knew it was dyin’. Lookin’ back, we didn’t know how right we were.” Tony dropped his head sadly and munched on a piece of celery.
After drinking juice from his small thermos, Richard asked, “When did you and your friends start seeing that love was dying?”
“At Berkeley. There was this huge rally on the campus against the Vietnam War. That was 1966. We could see that the killin’ in Nam was just a symptom of the problem. We could see that the establishment was to blame.”
“The ‘establishment’? When I came across that term in my reading, I could never really figure out what you people meant.”
Tony smiled indulgently. “You know, that artificial machine we call society—that’s the establishment. It tries to stamp everybody with the same face and outlook. Every soul is expected to spend 24 hours a day on a capitalistic hunt for the almighty dollar. Our movement centered on love, not bank accounts and prized possessions.”
“I don’t see how you separated yourself from society since, as you say, it had stamped its patterns on you. Didn’t the establishment create the love you saw dying, in the first place?”
“Oh man. You’re too young to know what I’m sayin’. You see Richard, nowadays, we hear about crime, greed, pollution . . . and we don’t think anything about it, ‘cause we’re desensitized.”
“In other words, we’ve come to see it as normal.”
“Yeah, we see what’s goin’ on as ‘normal’. Funny thing about the word normal. Norm gives a group a standard how to act. Whatever the group accepts as normal is normal, or whatever it sees as true is true. It doesn’t matter how bad it really is, either. So, we can’t assume that most people, even the majority, know what’s true. If we can’t have the truth from our society, we have to go out and find it for ourselves.”
“Well how do we do that?”
“I’m glad you asked me that,” smiled Tony. “You find truth in the natural, and in the spontaneous.”
“I think I know what you’re getting at.”
“That’s just it,” said the other. “You don’t have to ‘think’ about it. Just feel it.”
“Feel what?”
“Richard, don’t you get it? You don’t analyze a thing like love. You let it come to you. You’re tryin’ to grasp what I’m sayin’, but you’re tryin’ too hard. And that’s the influence of the establishment. It creates a regulated, controlled environment that dictates how to act and what to think. It forces you to conform. ‘One size fits all’ reads the label.”
“Well there are certainly a lot of people who let others think for them,” said Richard, still not sure if this was what Tony was getting at. Suddenly glancing at his watch, Richard let Tony know that the lunch period was nearly over.
“See what I mean? The clock says jump and everyone goes to their pigeonhole.” Tony spoke with the tone of one whose point had been proven.
As the two men parted company to head for their respective stations, they both expressed interest in talking further about the social revolution of the 1960s and ‘70s. Tony saw the revolution as a continuing objective in society, one not fully realized; whereas Richard saw it as a dissipating influence in society, losing ground to traditional forces. In college he had written research papers on it, which he believed, made him something of an authority.
The days seemed to pass faster and faster with little change in routine for Richard. What did change was his growing respect for his fellow workers. The men and women who worked the graveyard shift, he came to realize, were industrious, good humored, and helpful to one another. They showed knowledge and skill in their jobs that came not from books but from experience.
Richard especially looked forward to lunch periods when he could converse with Tony, whose first-hand recollections of the “hippie era,” as Tony called it, transported Richard back in time. During one of their conversations in the lunch room, Richard decided to satisfy his curiosity about Tony’s attire.
“Say Tony, would you tell me why you always wear tie-dyed white dress shirts?”
“Ah, you noticed.”
Richard thought that the brightly-colored dress shirt could hardly escape notice, but said, “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“I wear these to protest white-collar greed, which consumes the days and nights of the people in this country.”
“Yes, but if it weren’t for the profit motive, we wouldn’t have a . . .”
“By the way, do you know what day this is?” interrupted Tony.
“No, I can’t say that I do. Is it your birthday?”
“It’s kind of a birthday, but not mine. It was 30 years ago today, on August 15, 1969, that we met near Woodstock, New York—three hundred thousand of us!”
“So you were at the Woodstock Music Festival! I’ve read about that.” Richard was obviously impressed to know someone who was part of such an historic event. “You say, three hundred thousand hippies!”
“Well, no. We weren’t all hippies. There were students, too, and those who opposed the war in Vietnam among us. But, it was like one big love-in, man. Woodstock was a gathering of many types of people who put out good vibrations, ‘cause they had it together, unlike the older generations.”
“Had what ‘together’?”
“Man, I’ve got to go through all this with you sometime—so you know where I’m comin’ from. For now, just follow along as best you can, Richard.” Tony closed his eyes. “I can still see the huge field, all of us standin’ as far as the eye can see, mostly people your age, packed tight before a long platform. I was, I don’t know, ‘bout a hundred feet from the front of the platform. We were crowded together with so much love—I mean nobody shoved you. People you didn’t know put their arms around you. Sometimes the crowd would surge forward in anticipation of the next band, like when the Grateful Dead came on. But the crowd’s movement really worried the cops,” said Tony, a sneer in his voice.
“Cops?” queried Richard.
“Oh yeah, well, there was a bunch of cops all around, ‘cause the people in the towns close by thought we were goin’ to riot or somethin’ and so they sent all these cops to watch us. They didn’t trust us ‘cause of the establishment’s propaganda. They should’ve believed how the event was advertised: ‘Three Days of Peace, Love, and Music’—I still have one of the original posters. But they figured they had somethin’ to fear. And they did, but not what they thought.”
“What did they have to fear?”
“That we had the power to turn the world around—through the power of love,” said Tony with a look of mixed confidence and sadness. “You know, Richard, all those people comin’ together didn’t make any trouble, even when it started to rain and the food and water ran out. I can still remember the smell of wet grass and flowers in my girlfriend’s hair.”
“How come the food and water ran out? Didn’t the promoters prepare well?”
“I
