AH, WOODSTOCK. Makes
me think of Apollo 11, flower
power, The Revolution, acid
rock and the general, all-pur-
pose Dawning of the Age of
Aquarius. It was a helluva
era, wasn't it?

I'm sure, like me, a few, ah,
mature readers, will have snapshots
glued in an album somewhere of
themselves with a peace pendant
hanging around their neck, paisley
fared pants, an idiotic grin, and pos-
sibly a dandelion or two in their hair.

Has the world changed, or what?

[read one Woodstock retrospec-
tive recently which tried to make the
point that the hippies won the war:
that is to say. that meHowness has
become ie norm, and peaple can
wear their hair any length they want.
The suggesiion was that in the priva-
cy of our homes, at least, many peo-
ple turn on, tune in and drop out —
that our vibes are less strung-out than
they used to be.

Newsweek weighed in with a
piece that stated: ‘The Dionysiac
triad of sex, drugs and rock and rol!
now dominates private life and popu-
lar culture, The Aquarian tenet of
radical egalitarianisin informs much
of our public and private discourse.
Although few people actually talk
like government-off-our-backs hip-
pie anarchists anymore, the principle
that laws are for killjoys has been put
into practise everywhere from the
inner city to Wall Street.

“Peace and love’? Well, love is
always a toughie ... (but) it would
take-an invasion from Alpha
Centauri to bring back the military
draft. To a degree that would aston-
ish a time traveller from 1969, we
now live in the Woodstock Nation.
And ain’t we got fun.”

Theodore Roszak, the Berkeley
historian who coined the term
“counter-culture,” was hanging
around Vancouver a lot in 1969. I
met him. A really nice fellow. We
were on panel together at UBC dis-
cussing “alternative realities,” during

Bob
Hunter

STRICTLY PERSONAL

which he said: “What the young are
up to is nothing less than a reorgani-
zation of the prevailing state of per-
sonal and social consciousness.

“From a culture that has a long-
standing, entrenched commitment to
an egocentric and intellective mode
of consciousness, the young are
moving toward a sense of identity
that is communal and non-intellec-
tive.”

I wrote a column afterwards that
stated: “He compares the young —
the potheads and rock festival fans
and amateur Zen dabblers and LSD
freaks and multi-media artists and
anti-bra girls with Indian bands
around their long, straight hair, these
and more, many more — to the early
Christians in Rome. They are not
thrown to the tions, of course. They
are however, often thrown to what
they have come to call the pigs.”

Much has been made of the fact
that the year of Woodstock was also
the year of the landing on the moon.
Tt wasn't just mud-splatted stoned
flower children who were shouting
the word “peace.” Neil Armstrong
himself left a plaque on the grey sand
of our satellite that said, “We came
in peace for all mankind.”

In another column at the time, I

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wrote fearlessly: “Few ? could
have done more to stimulate an
awareness of the world as an indivis-
ible whole than those photos and
telecasts of the Earth as seen from
out in space or from the surface of
the moon. tis this awakening eco-
logical consciousness ... thatis
thrusting anti-petlution groups mito
existence in every country, that ts
inaking pollution a political issue...

“The concept of nationalisn —-
which in its heyday allowed Britain,
France, Spain, Russia, Germany
(name just about any country) to
indulge in imperialism and conquest
at will -— is dying. A new kind of
nationalism, based siniply on the
urge for autonomy and selfdetermi-
nation, to emerge in ils place.”

How different was the
Woodstock era from now? Here's an
intriguing item (rom my files. The
newly-formed Society for Pollution
and Environmental Control (SPEC)
was in the midst of a crisis. After cin
initial growth spurt, probably
inspired by those photos from space,
it had run into its fiest imernal politi-
cal hassle, :

Some members were appatied
when SPEC came out with a poster
depicting MacMillan Blocdel as
dvrannosaurus rex, king of the pol-
luters, labelling the company an
environmental criminal. Some mem-
bers were delighted that the fledgling
group (membership had soured from
16 to 7,500) was finally joined in
battle with the forest industry, while
others were afraid the poster would
ruin the group's nonpartisan middle-
class image.

‘The argument between Derrick
Mallard, the group's gentle founder,
and the new president, Robin Harger,
was over whether or not environ-
mentalism should be “radicalized.”

the Second Narrows Brid
along Canada Way to Queen

Sunday, August 14, 1994 - North Shore News - 7

e were stardust, we were

“The reality of the situation,”
according to Jin Marunehak,
SPEC"s first communication diree-
tor “is that we've never been able to
get anything in the newspapers on
MacMillan Bloedel. | was told by
somebody al The Province, whom |
shat name, that there isan obvious
hunily relationship between Mae Blo
and the press.”

AL that point in time, not too
many people had connected Marshall
MeLuhan with environmentalism
but, congenitally fearless, { wrote
several columns noting that, with his

golden

talk of re-tribalization and the forma-
tion of a Global Village, what he was
really saying is that people were
being converted en masse to an
essentially evological perspective, an
intellectual transformation every bit
us Critical as the new image of the
world as one jewel floating in space.

Shortly after this prophetic mater-
ial was published, McLuhan’s broth-
er Maurice phoned to tell me that
Marshall had read what I'd written.
and had a message for me. The mes-
sage was that what I'd written was
full of baloney.

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