THOUGHT IS ENERGY

Here is a thing to think about.

I am guilty of this too, so don't get all uppity at me for having thought.

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Moving on from the 60's.
I saw the television movie, "The 60's." It really stirred me emotionally. Having experienced that era, I again felt the anger raise up in me as images recapped those days. I also felt that anxiousness reach back into me grabbing my soul. I now feel as though that film showed me where I took a hard 90° turn in life changing the course of my life forever.
By the late 60's, my feelings about the war were of disgust and I wanted to effect a change in government policy yet I was still too young and powerless to do that which I aspired. That and the dissonance within myself created a lack of commitment. I went with doing nothing. Of course I did talk with friends, sharing my anger and contempt of the situation of our nation.
I feel incomplete about that time in my life experience. I feel as though I yet have to finish something I left behind back then. I can't place an answer to the question of just what that would be though. It is as though there is a ghost from that era coming back, haunting me and pulling me to look once again at that history to find that lost part of myself. It seems to me, if I could just get there, I could find a missing part of myself and become complete as a person. But where is the time machine and do I really think I want to go back to that tormented time. That part of living is gone. If placed in the same circumstances I would undoubtedly do exactly the same thing again.
I wanted to be in Berkley and San Francisco, participating. I heard about all those things, those happenings, daily, from my vantage point of life less than 50 miles away. Yet from my position, influenced by both parents and pears, inexperienced and fearful, I watched the happenings from home. Home, safe in that known, familiar, protected space. I watched the world from a color television set stuck in a corner of our living room. The headlines stunned us continually. If it wasn't the deaths of soldiers or the strong friends of the world, it was the misguided beatings and killing of demonstrators who spoke and pushed their beliefs. It was a disturbing time to reach for adulthood.
Music became one substance that bound a generation together. It demonstrated the jagged truth of a generation's dissatisfaction with the values of both the established government and the preceding generations. It sprang out in both its discord of unity and its raging emotion. The loudness expressed the level of disenchantedness in the normal ordered world. It became something new and more importantly, something to identify with. It showed a generations willingness to experience and create something new. The concept of a utopian communal society sprang fourth as what was needed to create peace and harmony for the world. The music succeeded but the ideas failed.
Music is nearly all that remains from that idealistic revolution. Music has no need to be proven as does a concept in living. Music is quickly accepted or rejected by society because it has no action. A communal society on the other hand, to be tested. The concept has to be accepted by the entire population to become reality. The idea came, hung out there for a number of years, to eventually wither and slip into the silence of thought. Society rejected the idea for many reasons, one being, the forces that were in place could not be taken from power. I now think we are too evolved to go there. For society to change to that degree our monetary system would have to be abolished. It is not entirely a bad concept but money is too engrained in the way we have developed to suddenly become obsolete.
So I leave these thoughts and this writing with little more than my own emotion. There is nothing that can be done to make just our history. Those who lost living to the injustice of that time, are just gone. They have no chance to right the wrongs that were given them by society. The injustice of governments bringing us "the rule of law" can be wrong. Sometimes doing what close minded fixed society envision, allows the cruelty of humans to stand out and dominate. My thoughts and reasoning tells me that little has changed in the ways of governments and society. This is surely still not the utopia that some of us were seeking.

Consumption Without Thought.
Oh the marvel of living in the modern world. In this era, we humans have placed ourselves in an existence entirely beyond the realm of nature. We can now do things detrimental to our planet and experience little if any of the effect. Our mistakes in daily choices now hide within the mistakes of our past. They become a piece of what we see because it is a part of what we see. We walk through life and see mostly what we have created, seldom seeing what the earth created before we changed it. Our own clutter of fabrication now covers so much of the landscape that it is becoming difficult to see beyond what we have made. To most people, the world is a big city, buildings, streets and sidewalks. Wood, steel, glass, concrete and asphalt is just about all they see. It is the norm. It is a problem that is not even realized by most. It is this artificial environment that people are drawn to. We need excitement, money and instant gratification. These three things are found in city living.
In this city environment we escape thought about where our creation comes from. We escape the realization that some of what we do daily has detrimental effects to our world. In our creation we can no longer even see the destruction. If a car leaks oil, falling to the pavement there is no visible harm. On the other hand if that same oil dripped on your favorite rose bush, it would be quite evident that this is a problem. Oil is a toxic substance to most living things. Yet these kind of things are disguised in our artificial environment. Other examples are common. The metals used in our buildings and transportation systems come from the earth. These mines are in places outside the city and urban sprawl. A mine is a great example of the hidden in our creation. Mines are generally out of sight, hidden not by design but by geography. If it were in your city it would be quite definite to you. But since it is not within the view of the city environment, out of your personal space, so to speak, its existence becomes mute. Wood, the substance that most live within is another example. Wood, the tree, the forest, there used to be a forest where I now live. Only remnants of it still stand here. The forests are being taken down by our insensitivity and ignorance. Forests are a vital part of our planet yet the city uses the resource of lumber which all comes from outside the city. I live outside the city and see the forest going down the road on trucks. My favorite places to hunt are being changed from dense lush forest, to depleted dry landscapes covered with stumps, down burned logs and weeds. Yes there are small trees coming on again, but I will never see the mature forest that once stood at my favorite hunting spot. I think of the birds that once sang in that forest. They all lost their home. Maybe one day something will come and take our homes away from us too.
I think a lot of what has let us become this way is our transportation. It may not be the instrument but the speed with which we travel. It is so out of the norm of nature that it may alter the way we perceive things. It could be that if we had to walk everywhere we went, seeing the world pass by in all its detail around our feet that we could notice and become appreciative of the things nature provides. We would be less likely to toss litter on the path that we walked every day. But then we turned all the paths to concrete where there is no nature to see so what is wrong with putting a little more garbage on the concrete anyhow. The concrete will never make a flower bed and seems so un-natural. That is the key, our artificial environment. Think about it. Do you litter your front yard? Why not? Because it is in your personal space. If you walked every place you went, your personal space would become quite large. Driving around in automobiles changes the concept of territory. We travel at such speeds that things like small flowers, insects and litter go nearly un-noticed, with exception of the insects that splat on your windshield. Our minds are un-impacted by the things we go by at speed. We just can't see that much that quickly. But more than that there is the distraction of the audio system. The sound at a volume to overcome the noise of the vehicles. It is no wonder we as a species are creating such destruction. In our hurry to live we forget to look at the space we are in.
Due to our hurry there is little thought about what we buy and about what we throw away. We are so consumed by living the thought of thinking about what we do seldom enters our brain. We want, so we get. Where does this stuff we consume come from and where does the stuff we throw away go. The real question to ask is do we really need it or is it just a want. Need, will we die if we don't have it. That is a need. Disposable plates, cups and the towels are an expression of just how lazy we have become in living. It is easier to just throw it out than clean up a mess. Washing the dishes has become too much to do for some of us. We can't afford servants so we turn to disposables. We can put it in the garbage and never think about it again. Again, think about the garbage. Where does it go and how much do you generate every day.
We have set ourselves up to be over consumptive. We live without even thinking about what we consume, where it comes from, where it goes when we are through with it, and if it is a finite resource. What will our descendants do when all the metal has been mined, has been used up and dumped in a landfill, because we were to lazy to recycle?

History

Back in 1969 I went to high school in South Lake Tahoe, California USA. For a while there I rode my grease ball Harley Davidson chopper to school. Rode up into the parking lot the first day of school that fall and got rousted by the police as soon as I shut off the engine. The officer couldn't believe that I could be a student and ride a Harley. But I was odd for those times. Oh those were the days, carefree and ignorant as to what the world really held in the future for all. Friends form that time have slipped away, as though gone to life. Most of them are gone to mine now except for memory. Memory are great things. Memories of Lake Tahoe, so blue so moody so magnetic. Memories of people like Terry Campo, one who died, so did Mark Luffler, and I imagine a lot more have gone that direction. But for most we still live, live apart, separately, unknown to one another and it seems a shame. There are so many that I know nothing about. So many that I sometimes wonder about, where they are now in life, and what they do with their every days.
I know I am still a vital person alive and I think healthy. I have gone through a lot of changes in the time between then and now. Even more people have come and gone. I found many occupational ventures to occupy my time, to provide money to live on and to use as an avenue to meet people and be sociable. I have done so many things. Fisheries biology, watershed management, wildlife management, carpentry, house painting, concrete finishing, auto mechanics, jet engine mechanics, handyman, dishwasher, cooks runner, and chain ape are just about all the things I can remember doing for work. While in high school I got my first real job at the Pony Express Lodge up on Kingsbury. At the same time I worked with my Uncle Curtis at his welding shop called Joe's Welding Works on HWY 50 down by the Y. Old Joe had sold the business to my Uncle a few years prior. in future years my Uncle bought out the auto shop next door and combined the two businesses calling it Curt's Auto-Weld Clinic. During the days I worked helping my Uncle with heavy projects of steel and welding, building steel septic tanks, installation and design of trailer hitches for pickup trucks, and some repair of snow plows also. Then in the evenings I washed dishes up at the Pony. It now seems like that was the start of life. I guess that is because it was the real beginning of independence. My Uncle and I just worked all the time. I didn't have any time to spend the money I made that summer. Then one day in late August I went down the hill to Napa and saw a Harley Davidson Motorcycle for sale in front of a gas station. I had money to burn from working and the thought of owning a Harley sent me off. I bought it. I put it in the back of my Mother's pickup truck and went with her back up to the lake. Wild days came to me, or I went to them. They were real for my life then. The ego trip of it all, the pretentiousness of my life back them. I seemed to think that having a chopper made me fit in, made me important, strong and most of all powerful. Crap, it was all crap. I didn't want to know that then. I wanted to be something to people that I truly was not. At that time in life I lived in the assumption that you are the image that you can build for yourself through things and actions. Where that is true, I wanted to be tough and be looked up to as big and strong. I really could not be big and strong but owning a Harley provided the image that I was big and strong. Ignorant and arrogant I was, back then. I am still ignorant but not arrogant. But to me those people of the school days seem important now, today.
Those who shared time and living energy with me, I salute you. I wonder where you are today. I hope you all do as well or better than I. I now wish you knew the real me. I really wish I could have been a person who knew how to really be smart back then. I was just too afraid to look life in the face then. I guess I am just learning who I really am, now. I mean in recent years. So from then to now, hello to you all.