I’ve given this question a lot of thought since my last post a week ago, aided and abetted by many responses from my readers who are wondering the same thing. I’ve mulled over Wallace Stegner, a favorite writer of mine, who late in life railed against what he viewed as the hedonism of the sixties generation, eroding the urge to activism for social justice and replacing it with the pursuit of pleasure in many forms. And there is truth in that.
Fundamental to the failure of the sixties generation to change was the reinforcement of conventional gender roles; I remember being disheartened when I visited the much ballyhooed exhibit on the New Mexico communes—there were a lot of them—by the photos of women nursing and carrying babies, stirring stewpots, and so on. Living off the grid places heavy work on women; the men are usually somewhere else. And when I visited New Buffalo, a “repurposed” commune north of Taos, now a B&B, its commercial life seemed to me a direct contradiction of what the dreams of the original commune dwellers had been.
But of course they were never more than a tiny historical exception, a pebble in the onrushing ocean of our obsession with the material. And when I hear the increasingly strident arguments on all sides that we must reopen businesses even as the rate of infection continues to climb, I think the restlessness that spurs the American dream is as much to blame as sympathy for our-of-work neighbors.
Because really what the “haves” want to do is shop and eat at restaurants, consuming more overpriced goods and overpriced food. That keeps the wretchedly paid retail staff and the army of waiters and cooks dependent on tips and lacking all forms of insurance creeping along. And that is one place that the flowers have gone: into a trough dug by our greed for the little spurt of pleasure we want to feel when we buy something we didn’t make or eat something we didn’t cook—in a world where our greed is despoiling everything around us.
But whoever says the word greed? It has gone into the trough along with all those tiresome old sayings: “a stitch in time saves nine”; “save the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves; “lie down with dogs and get up with fleas…”
Feeding our obsession with the material is our wholesale discounting of any form of religious practice, with a bow here and there to a form of Buddhism. Long ago it became unfashionable to talk about faith. People who have never been in a church or temple or read a religious text cheerfully call themselves agnostic. But whatever our legitimate gripes may be with organized religion, it does lay down rules of conduct: “Love your neighbor as yourself” for well-off communities where many people live behind gates and have never met their neighbors. Human nature being what it is, at times fickle, superficial, selfish, and besotted with strange ideas, a code of conduct is not a bad thing.
Our consumerism is also fed by our helplessness. Few of us know how to change the oil in a car, let alone replace a flat tire. Buttons are not sewn on—easier to throw the garment out and buy a new one. The basement workshop where small appliances were once repaired no longer exists, because the computers that drive all our appliances are not amenable to tinkering with a screwdriver. And because of planned obsolescence, nothing lasts. It doesn’t matter how much you pay; the thing collapses in a few years or needs a replacement part that is no longer being made.
But wait. In the midst of my near despair, I just met a young African-American woman, a graduate student at a divinity school and an anchor at a television station who stood everything I’ve been saying on its head. Not only her amazing career but the astonishing fact that she is the first and so far the only reader of my The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke to perceive the truly radical nature of Doris’ color blindness: her instinctive comradeship with dark-skinned men and women.
And—four of my five young grandchildren went to the protests in their cities.
So will this younger generation find those flowers? I don’t know, but at least there’s a chance that they may try.
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