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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