How the Baby Boomers Almost Saved the World

…and why they failed

"Say the word and you’ll be free

Say the word and be like me

Say the word I’m thinking of

Have you heard the word is love?

It’s so fine, It’s sunshine

It’s the word, love"

– John Lennon & Paul McCartney, The Word

http://www.strike-the-root.com/71/allport/allport7.html

Wow man, that piece like, totally needed more Lennon quotes, dude.

I have to commend the author for being a surprisingly clean and articulate hippy, and there is a lot in that article that is easy to agree with. Unfortunately the implied goal of the author is basically impossible to achieve because it depends ultimately upon every individual recognizing the necessary interaction between love and freedom without coercion, and implementing that interaction within his and her own life.

It’s a concept that can work well for organizations like religions or maybe even whole governments, but it will eventually break down on the individual level because there will always be someone who will wish to impose their will upon someone else. That’s not pessimism, it’s realism. Furthermore, the idea of coercion is found at the foundation of the idea of Law. Laws would of course not be needed in Lennon’s Nutopia, because everybody would be cool and ‘with it’. But Nutopia doesn’t exist, and in the real world there will always be people who need to be removed from a society for the betterment of that society.

Maybe they need to be removed because they are dangerous to other individuals (see: Mark David Chapman, Saddam Hussein, etc.). Maybe they need to be removed because they are greedy (see: Ken Lay, Charles Keating, etc.), but regardless, there has to be someone willing to coerce them to stop taking advantage of all us free and loving individuals who want to just be, because of course we won’t do it ourselves, that would be all like, coercive and therefore not cool.

Reducing the number of laws will reduce the number of people in jail, but it won’t reduce the number of people who want what someone else has. And it won’t reduce the number of people who want to have power over other people. Such desire might be the result of “emotional damage” as per the author, or it might just be “evil” as per Dubya, but in the end it really doesn’t matter, because neither of those things are going to go away, no matter how many good vibes we send out, or how much pot the author smokes.

That is all.

[quote]ssn0 wrote:
…and why they failed

"Say the word and you’ll be free

Say the word and be like me

Say the word I’m thinking of

Have you heard the word is love?

It’s so fine, It’s sunshine

It’s the word, love"

– John Lennon & Paul McCartney, The Word

http://www.strike-the-root.com/71/allport/allport7.html[/quote]

They left behind some kickass music in thier wake.