Part I:
growing up in the repressive 1950s
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Even in the 1950s, a stealth wave was gathering force
CC Jean Stimmell: 7/10/13 |
Strangely,
out of the blue, I started having what Jung called “Big Dreams.” Interpreting
them with my Jungian analyst brought out a flood of repressed emotion. My analyst
first suspected my tears were a manifestation of depression, but my anguish apparently
is more a reflection of impacted grief: a combination of nostalgia for the
1960s and longing for lost youth.
We
grew up in the 1950s serenaded by a constant lullaby that we lived in the best
of all possible worlds. The road to my rosy future was to follow the rules, put
my nose-to-the-grindstone, and be hormonally frustrated by light petting
because “good girls” didn’t put out, all done in the service of following the
American dream: growing up to get some vacuous, pencil-pushing job that would
provide the means to purchase a ricky-ticky little house in some suburban
wilderness with all the modern “labor-saving appliances, along with 2.5
children, a dog, a white picket fence, and a wife that was the perfect robotic
helpmate like Mrs. Cleaver from Leave it
to Beaver.
In
a variation of the movie, Wally’s World, we lived on a stage set directed by
Lawrence Welks, Lassie, John Wayne and Uncle Walt Disney broadcasting a mind-numbing
agent, the equivalent of the psychotropic drug, Thorazine, which was also being
used at the time to sedate our fellow citizens in mental institutions across
the land.
Underneath,
we all felt a diffuse free-floating fear and existential dread. Although we
couldn’t articulate it, our middle class life was a fantasy, a cozy white cloud
projection based on massive denial about what was going on around us: lynchings,
unjust wars, massive poverty, sexual repression, gross discrimination, paranoia
and ever-present anxiety ratcheted up by real-life nightmares like the bomb
shelters the government encouraged our parents to build and duck-and-cover exercises
we practiced in grammar school, as if that would protect us from the inevitable
Russian nuclear attack.
Cultural
conditions were still about the same when I dropped out of college in 1964,
resulting in an unplanned sabbatical to Vietnam. Imagine my surprise when I returned
from war to a whole new world: a rising tide of unleashed emotion and spirited
protest against the stale, gray world I grew up in. What a rush! I felt the very fibers of my being coming
alive like the lush, long fibers of a shag carpet, slowly unfurling and recovering
their natural loft, after being crushed by the deadweight of 100,000 cold war
bureaucrats.
Certainly
one aspect of our awakening was tribal bliss, a bacchanal of sensual
abandonment, celebrating our arrival in the promised land after spending our
childhood’s locked in the barren, spooky cellar of 1950s repression. Our
childhood brainwashing that Americans were the most perfect of all people,
living in the greatest nation on earth, blessed even by God himself, began to fade
away along with crew-cuts, suit coats, neckties, and girdles. As we emerged
from the dark denial our childhood, we discovered new horizons, more
far-reaching, authentic, and diverse than we could have imaged.
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Part 2: Coming
of Age in the Sixties
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The
cresting wave ushering in the Age of Aquarius
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CC Jean Stimmell 7/11/13
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Introduction to Part II: As we emerged from the dark denial of our childhoods and came
of age in the Sixties, we found ourselves swept up in a paradigm-shifting wave
of rapid social change causing us to embrace new horizons, more far-reaching,
authentic, and diverse than we could have ever imagined.
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Entrenched authority was being challenged at every turn: The civil rights movement, personified by Martin Luther King,
opened our eyes to how black Americans were treated more like farm animals
than human beings in many places in our country because of state sanctioned
discrimination, disenfranchisement, violence and routine lynchings. And that was
just the tip of the iceberg. The movement soon blossomed to fight for
equal rights for other victims of discrimination: women, gay, lesbian, Native
American, Hispanic…the list kept expanding, and rightfully so, to include just
about everyone but privileged white men.
The word was finally getting out.
Although rivers were catching on fire because of pollution, it
took Rachael Carson’s book, Silent Spring, detailing how pesticides were
ravaging nature, to jumpstart a resurgent environmental movement. Michael
Harrington published to instant acclaim, The Other America, detailing
for the first time in the mainstream media the extent of “invisible poverty” in
America. How could we have been so morally obtuse and visually handicapped,
even if we were segregated in our suburban havens and gated communities, not
to apprehend that 25% or more of our fellow citizens were living in abysmal
poverty.
And then, of course, there was the Vietnam War where we lost
over 58,000 of our brothers and sisters in a war against Ho Chi Minh, who lead
a national movement for liberation for more than three decades, first against
the Japanese, then the French, and finally the Americans. He fashioned his
declaration of independence after ours and was considered the George Washington
of his country.
Before America exhausted itself in our war against Vietnam
independence, we carpet-bombed Vietnam for over a decade, saturated its soils
with deadly pesticides and killed millions of Her citizens, mostly civilian
men, woman, and children. Vietnam was an object lesson in the dangers of
the Military Industrial Complex that President Eisenhower warned us about a
decade earlier. With the blindfold ripped off, we could see for the first time
with fresh eyes how many of the wars we had fought for "freedom and
democracy” were, in reality, patriarchal wars to dominate, control, and,
perhaps most important of all, to provide unfettered access for corporate
plundering around the world.
These were incredibly exhilarating times to live through, throwing
off the cultural straightjacket of the 1950s, regressing to what is really real: the earthiness of nature,
the sensuality of our bodies, our deep intimacy with our cohorts all sharing an
identical mindset, and our increasing compassion and empathy with minorities of
all stripes and third-world people around the world. The solidarity was
tribal in nature.
In turn, our tribal solidarity fed into, supported, and
magnified the social movements, I’ve already mentioned, causing them to gather
strength everyday, building like a huge tsunami wave, so big that when– and it
was only a matter of time – it would crash over America, changing everything,
ushering in the Age of Aquarius.
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Part 3: Aquarius
Aborted
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CC Jean Stimmell 7/11/13
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Introduction to Part III:
The 1960s were incredibly
exhilarating times to live through, throwing off the cultural straightjacket of
the 1950s, regressing to what is really real: the earthiness of nature, the
sensuality of our bodies, our deep intimacy with our cohorts all sharing an
identical mindset, and our increasing compassion and empathy with minorities of
all stripes and third-world people around the world. The solidarity was tribal in nature.
Our tribal solidarity, in
turn, feed into, supported, and magnified the social movements, I’ve already
mentioned, causing them to gather strength everyday, building like a huge
tsunami wave, so big that when– and it was only a matter of time – it would
crash over America, changing everything, ushering in the Age of Aquarius:
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Our
tribal enthusiasm, born of collective solidarity, gave us supreme confidence we
were being swept along on the crest of an unstoppable wave, destined to wash
away all obstacles, ushering in a new society of peace and happiness. The
unfortunate downside of this was our naïve assumption that this collective
triumph would automatically translate into personal happiness in our individual
lives, without having to do any work on ourselves.
None
of that!
No
delayed gratification, no grueling individual hardships, no wandering in the
dark forest in search for who we were and uncovering what our unique mission in
life was supposed to be. All we had to do is go with the flow…at least that was
the unspoken assumption of too many of us.
Hunter
Thompson, author and infamous originator of “Gonzo” journalism was, in many
ways cynical and hard-core, but even he was driven to rave poetically about the
potential of this mythical wave we were riding:
My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five
or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half
crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay
Bridge at a hundred miles an hour...but being absolutely certain that no matter
which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and
wild as I was: no doubt at all about that...
And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable
victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military
sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail.
There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the
momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave...
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep
hill in Las Vegas and look west, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost
see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled
back.[1]
There
is a sad postscript to this story: Hunter Thompson committed suicide in 2005,
probably from the same impacted grief I was suffered from. Many of us of my
generation have such impacted grief, stemming, I believe, from two sources:
First
and foremost, we were devastated when the new age we thought was inevitable was
traumatically aborted, dashing our hopes for a kinder, gentler, more peaceful
world based on social justice and compassion, a new world that would celebrate
the innate worth of not only each human being but every sentient being – as opposed to our current
Military-Industrial-Media-Complex parroting Ayn Rand’s creed extolling the
survival of the fittest.
The
second cause of our impacted grief was personal. The magical bombast of the
1960s combined with the intense collective tribal identity caused us, as I
mentioned before, to neglect the hard work of working on ourselves, learning to
individualize and self-actualize into the unique individuals, each of us were
meant to be.
Joseph
Campbell, famous mythologist and sixties icon, was clued in to all of this, as
evidenced by this quote:
“The myth is
the public dream and the dream is the private myth. If your private myth, your
dream, happens to coincide with that of the society, you are in good accord
with your group. If it isn't, you've got an adventure in the dark forest ahead
of you.”[2]
Our
public dream in the 1960s was riding that awesome wave, so well described by
Hunter Thompson, surging in, unstoppable, poised to wash over us, baptizing us
all into the Age of Aquarius. Tragically, as we all know now, that wave
crested prematurely, reversed directions, started to recede, and still
continues its tragic ebb today, returning us to the corporate mentality of the
1950s along with the return of rising poverty, inequality, and a pervasive
feeling of existential dread – this time not from fear of nuclear attack by
godless Russians but terrorist attacks by heathen Muslims.
Campbell
is correct: We are strangers in a strange land and when that happens, like it
or not, we have no choice but to do the hard work to find our way to an
authentic life. It’s not easy. As he
tells us, you have to blaze your own trail:
“You enter the forest
at the darkest point,
where there is no path.
Where there is…path,
It is someone else's path.
If you follow someone else's
way,
you are not going to realize
your potential.” [3]
That’s why I’m working with my Jungian analyst, wise woman, blazing
a trail out of the dark forest. It’s never too late. And it is a grand adventure.
XXX
[1] Songs of the Doomed, Hunter Thompson,
pp. 140-141
[2] http://mythsdreamssymbols.com/mythanddreams.html
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