Click on photo to enlarge (at your own risk)
In 1964, when I was 18 years old, Bob Dylan recorded a delightfully silly song called ‘I Shall Be Free No. 10’. Toward the end of the song he sings, “I’m going to grow my hair down to my feet, so strange I’ll look like a walking mountain range”. Those words resonated in me for reasons I didn’t yet fully understand, but my own hair was already well on its way to mountain range status.
The senseless war in Viet Nam was raging into a full blown holocaust and Dylan had already written the timeless ‘Masters Of War’, ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’, ‘With God On Our Side’, and ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’.
Those were ominous days to be coming of age---air raid sirens blasted through our communities every month to test the Civil Defense system, while in school we practiced weekly drills in readiness for a nuclear attack, the threat of which was very nearly realized during the Cuban Missile Crisis. But, my generation was still full of hope and optimism, because the times were a-changin’ as the youth of a nation---founded upon dissent and protest---rose up to speak truth to power, exercising their rights to free speech and freedom of assembly.
After years of highly visible protest and strife, with the police and the National Guard battering and brutalizing thousands of their own citizens, public sentiment finally forced our withdrawal from Viet Nam. And later, when our once earth-shattering Peace and Love counter-culture proved to be less than durable, some of us, refusing to abandon what we felt were our civil obligations, tried to concentrate our efforts on the ever more obvious environmental problems the world was facing.
Millions of ordinary people, after reading Rachel Carson’s ‘Silent Spring’, also rose up in protest, and DDT was soon banned in the U.S. Only through outspoken public activism was our government pushed to create the ‘Environmental Protection Agency’, write the ‘Endangered Species Act’, and declare an ‘Earth Day’.
Again, the times were a-changin’, and people could hear their own voices ringing within their democracy.
I’ve heard it said many times that protest and dissent don’t accomplish anything, but in truth, throughout history, protest, dissent, war, and collapse are the only things that have ever brought about societal change. I’ll take protest and dissent over war or collapse any time.
Just a few examples of dissent that bore rewarding fruit: The Boston Tea Party; Women’s Suffrage; The Labor Movement; The Civil Rights Movement; Viet Nam War Protests; Environmental Activism, and even more recently; protests against The World Trade Organization and The World Bank (which brought the economically and socially discriminatory, and environmentally destructive tactics of these institutions of globalization into public light, forcing them to re-evaluate at least some of their policies).
Now, back to the long hair thing…
To have long hair in the early 1960s made a person different looking, and many of us soon realized that most people didn’t like those who were different. Overnight we became part of a persecuted minority group and gained great insight into prejudice, bigotry and racism.
I also found that I relished being different from people who preferred a neat and orderly world, where nature was groomed, trimmed and manicured into little squares to satisfy some arrogant need for control.
Over many years, through the writings of Alexander von Humboldt, Charles Darwin, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Edward Abbey, and so many others, I’ve rediscovered that we’re not separate from Nature, and that in us, also resides wilderness, partly organized and partly chaos.
I’ve found my humble place in nature and I’m comforted in life, knowing that in death also, will I remain always among the ever-evolving diversity of species and elements that comprise the whole of life, not only on earth, but all throughout the dynamic rocks, magnetism, and dust of the cosmos. Quite something to be part of I’d say.
I cherish wild nature, ragged, unkempt, and “red of tooth and claw”, and fully realize that only in wilderness and diversity is there any hope for much of a human future.
Yet we humans continue in our ignorance and greed to appropriate, transform, and homogenize the wild and natural world to accommodate the orderly systems required by Empire and global commerce.
I too am caught up in this destruction, dependent upon the underpinnings of an unsustainable yet unrepentant society, but I can still protest, with my words, my actions and my appearance. So, I choose to more resemble an old growth forest than a clear-cut wasteland.
Most of the people running the world today look completely unnatural to me, especially the men, with their faces scraped bald and their ties cinched up around their necks like the yoke of a beast of burden. But what can we expect? These people were all 'educated' in our public school system, which was adopted from the Prussian system designed to train soldiers and factory workers. It's a short leap from school to the shaved and shorn regimen of the military. Our people do what they've been taught to believe is right, but, as Buffy Saint Marie said in her classic anti-war song, ‘Universal Soldier’, “He’s the one who gives his body as a weapon of the war and without him all this killin’ can’t go on”.
Fortunately, I was incompatible with school and the military, and, unsurprisingly, I also look quite different from the acceptable norm.
A beardless man that I do admire, Aldo Leopold, the so-called 'father of modern conservation' (modern conservation has actually had many fathers, and mothers), said we should “think like a mountain”, which, in my opinion, requires being just what you are, and, like a mountain, I’m simply what I am. This hair grows here and it’s staying as long as it wants to. Much of my life I’ve resembled Bob Dylan’s wild & woolly “walking mountain range”, which suits me just fine.
During the 43 years that I’ve had hair on my face, imagine the number of mined and manufactured razor blades I haven’t consumed and sent to landfills, the pile of shaving cream cans, the bottles of after-shave lotion, or the electric razors, and the electricity, or batteries, required by those contraptions.
Moreover, long beards do seem to have a function beyond ones preference of fashion, naturalism, or political statement. When working in the hot sun, as sweat runs down your face into the beard, any slight breeze will cool you down under the same evaporative principle as a swamp cooler works.
By the way, I also find women more attractive when they, like my beautiful wife Peggy, have all their lovely body hair in place.
While I’m comfortable with my place in nature, I haven't often been comfortable with the direction of my species and our 'culture'. My long-haired Hippie friends and I rejected the homogenized white-bread subdivided tract-house culture we were raised in, finding refuge in sleepy canyons on the outskirts, switching to natural whole-grains and organically grown foods, much of it from our own gardens. We had our babies by natural childbirth, breast-feeding them in stark contrast to the saddle-blocks, forceps, latex nipples and bottle-fed formulas of our own infancies. And we took to the streets in protest of war, racism and environmental destruction. Many of us still do.
I’m proud of those achievements, and yes, I do revel in my unconventional, obstinate eccentricity, but I don’t often walk around quite so fanciful. My daughter Jamie fixed me up for that photo a couple of years ago.
So, there you have it, my post-peace-blackout rant!
But I’m not through with you yet...
In the days to come I plan on posting pictures and articles from long past, and quite current, protests and actions I’ve been involved with, and if you want me to shut up, then use your own voice and actions to stop this war, rescue democracy, and effect change toward environmental sustainability.
Or this old fool may post even uglier pictures!!!
Labels: autobiographical, Jim, musicians, portraits, rants, social commentary
Click on photo to enlarge - © 2007 jim otterstrom
Click on photo to enlarge - © 2007 jim otterstrom
