No Dogs Or Personal Checks

www.storyofstuff.com

www.revbilly.com (The Church of Stop Shopping)

Global birth control. Plant hemp for fiber. Free exchange stores.

Good luck to us all.


Easter Week, 1971. A friend and I were hitchhiking up to Big Sur. In a van, cruising up Highway 1 through Malibu, we spotted three young hippie chicks thumbing alongside the road surrounded by a pack of dogs. The driver pulled over and the girls climbed in with just one dog. "All those other dogs are from around here. Whenever a car would pull over and we'd run toward it, the drivers would see all the dogs running with us and take off." Turns out they were part of a large group of folks from Long Beach on their way to a hot springs in the mountains up behind Santa Barbara. They'd loaded two cars with all the sleeping bags and food for everybody, and then the people had hitchhiked instead of taking a bunch more vehicles. Meeting up with about a dozen of their friends at State Street and 101 in Santa Barbara that night--back before the freeway ran all the way through town--I called an L.A. rock 'n' roll radio station about our location and destination, and a half-hour later two vans from a church group pulled up and, after a shot at saving our souls over hot chocolate and cookies at their lair, took us all up to the entrance to the National Forest and a few miles up the dirt road. Using what sleeping bags we had, we all slept in one large fun-filled pile on top of a moon-lit mountain, looking down on the clouds. The next day we started walking in, taking rides as occasional cars drove in. My friend and I ended up spending the week there, and then going to their big house in Long Beach to party with them there. (537 7th Street at Magnolia, by the 710 [back then the "7"] freeway on-ramp.) Several years later, my friend married one of the three girls in the first group we'd met. And I spent over a year with a girlfriend of theirs who came to visit the house from Key West with her mystical black Afghan hound dog, Hair. (I always loved when people laughed at me for hitchhiking.)

Those tomato farmers who recently lost all their crops for naught because of the salmonella scare remind me of the New York gang the Warriors from the movie by the same name. At the end when everybody realizes is wasn't a Warrior who shot Cyrus, after a night bopping their way home to Coney Island with all the other gangs after them, a radio dj says something like, oops, sorry, Warriors, but that's the way it goes sometimes in the Big City. Sorry tomato farmers, but it was hot peppers what did it. Oops.

I keep thinking: "The new [reluctant] hippies." From the bottom up, it's sinking in. Unrestrained consumerism is not turning out to be a workable long-term economic policy. Like when I was on the road having to carry everything I owned, it became glaringly obvious what was really important, and I adapted accordingly. Now with dropping incomes and rising prices, more and more folks are learning the same thing in their lives. Wise, concerned, and poor people have long known, but now the knowledge is quickly rising up the income chain. Reality is striking with a vengeance. Between the financial limitations we're facing and the doubtful continuation of life on Planet Earth, it's becoming obvious we need to start using less as a policy. Yet both major Presidential Candidates promise to "get the economy going again", guaranteed to hurry our doom. It's time to deal with what's really important to a good life, not keep Wall Street happy until we're all dead.

Yesterday the guy on the radio said that aware young people are beginning to sport thrift-store used jeans as a style, not the expensive designer jeans favored by their parents. I know that type thing has been happening in more and more ways, but what amazed me was hearing it admitted on a commercial, corporate-owned radio station. (I did only hear it once.) I'd love to see one of The Candidates show up somewhere in old jeans as a lifestyle statement instead of just always declaring their allegiance to Big Business and the Supreme Power: "The Economy." THAT's what it would take to get MY vote.

Group marriage. Six or eight or ten people living together saves the individuals from the horrors of monogamy, the dangers of STDs from just steppin' out on a partner, and helps save Planet Earth, needing only one vacuum cleaner, one big-screen TV, maybe even only one car, instead of each two people having to buy one of everything. At least it would be fun giving it a try. Saving the planet doesn't have to be boring.

Make love, not credit-card debt.