Thoughts on Awakening, Wednesday, Oct. 27, 2004 Paris. I woke up thinking that what's missing from the current events of the world is that this is all leading someplace positive. We live in times that are a mix of somber, stoic or sober, looked at one way, and out-to-lunch delusional, looked at another. Look at who is having all the fun. It's not really legitimate to have peace and freedom on your mind and still be celebrating. I give a lot of credit to anyone who dreams a little in this stretch of history. I know we have to fit our dreams into financial aid packages, long-term hopes, personal growth and subtle changes. It seems like the world is too messed up for anything else (besides raw corporate ambition). Yet if you want to pick a moment when we in America had reason to really freak out, turn the clock back to the 1950s when we had to get used to the notion that the atomic bomb could end everything in 15 minutes. It should have started with the first dropping of the bomb. Everyone born since this time has grown up in the nuclear shadow. We never really stop to think how this shapes our world view, our psyche, our way of life. No matter what we do, we're going to be living in this shadow, at least for the foreseeable future: likely, all our lives. So we need to bear that in mind, and in a sense dance with it. And every day we're being given a lot more to fear and we need to dance with that as well. Pushing it away won't work. As many of you know, I am a devoted student of the 1960s. I have been since the years when I edited the student magazine at SUNY Buffalo, Generation, and our suite of offices included a tiny store room full of ancient Buffalonian yearbooks. It was clear that something huge had happened in those years, many things, that the people had changed and that society had changed; events still hung in the air of the Main Street Campus, which was gradually being phased into a medical and dental school, but there were places where the spirit of the times were alive. There was a tunnel that the janitors would let us into, connecting Harriman and Norton (Squire) halls, that was covered with astonishing graffiti - with messages from other decades. I developed my curiosity in an independent study project with my American Studies professor, Michael Frisch who - in a very 1960s way - also gave me academic credit for my work as editor because he believed that it was both academically viable and a worthwhile contribution to the university community. That ethos was strong in anyone touched by America's moment of revolution and freedom. It was okay to use our resources for cooperation and for the betterment of our world. Simple. I began to form an impression off that era, which was - I assure you - every bit as intense as our own. My impression went a little like this. There was a holocaust going on called the Vietnam War. It was ripping through society with a dark energy. Many people understood it was a vicious injustice supported by nothing but lies and corporate profits. Thousands of boys were coming home dead. Remember that most of the 54,000 soldiers killed in that war were killed between 1965 and 1971, so there were something like 5,000 - 8,000 young men per year dying. Everyone was subject to the draft except those huddled on college campuses, most of whom were protesting the war. But the anti-Vietnam War movement was not just an anti-war movement. It was a vast social movement that was either building toward or including feminism, ecology, reform in education, an upsurge in the music and the arts, and many revolutions in society, government, academic thinking and the family. Upheavals are not just fun. This was also an at times terrifying, usually unstable time: John Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy (all of them, not coincidentally, the great liberal leaders of our century) had all fallen to assassins. Andy Warhol was attacked in 1968 but survived, dying too young 18 years later. Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin - three of the most brilliant musicians of the era (and many others) - had in fairly rapid sequence died of drugs and alcohol. The stability that America had come to know, artificial as it often was, from the mid 1940s through the early 1960s, had vanished and was replaced by a nonstop social earthquake that was nearly impossible to sleep through. Some people did. But throughout it, my impression was there was the sense that we are in this together. There was an urgent sense of community. There was the belief - that's all that we need - that the people, that's us, can make changes and improve our lives by changing both ourselves and changing the structure of society at the same time. There was a sense that we need to work with powerful ideas that can shape our minds, and we need to teach and teach and teach. The astrological heart of the 1960s was VIRGO because of the Pluto-Uranus conjunction of that era: service, teaching, healing, organizing, developing the intellect. The sense today that we're not in this together, that it's 'every man for himself', is a manufactured experience. It is manufactured mainly by advertising, by economic changes that have consumed all our time, and by academic programs that have made us afraid of one another (Abstinence Only). We need to create something else, something of our own, if we want to get past it. Or, perhaps, looked at much more simply, we need to get something out of the way: the fear of contact, the fear of admitting our fear, the fear of acknowledging that something is happening that we need to deal with, and ultimately, the fear that it may be too late to put events on the planet back on a positive track. I am not saying that it is too late. I'm saying that it's natural to have that fear and we need to face that fear first, if it's in the atmosphere. That is going to take an unusual degree of honesty, an unusually safe space. I can tell you this: we have a lot more freedom than we use. Over the past 25 years that I have been witnessing current events consciously, I can see that something has been taken from us. The freedom to dream. The freedom to feel we can use our strength to create a better world. The notion that we can create something together. Yes, we're allowed to move up in the world, and we're allowed to join the rapture, and to watch television. There are better dreams and there is a lot we can offer one another, if we would only dare, and dare to receive. >>