The great divide- round-wholistic-butter-side-down people vs. square-dogmatic-butter-side-up people. There is no convincing anyone to be other than what they are so where do we go from here? What does Dr. Seuss say? Well, he says just accept that everyone is different. This would be a great solution if dire issues like global warming, overpopulation and extinction was not putting pressure on us to agree.

There are progressives that want to deal with the issues and then there are regressives that want to go back to 1950, deny that there are problems and ignore all these complicated issues, understandably. It will take a huge reeducation effort to get them to even look at the issues, but will they ever be round – that is a tall order.

We can only hope that as young people circulate through the cities and hopefully travel around, they realize the world is not all Christian suburbia.

But as hippies in the woods, we like the rural life too. Our neighbors are usually those red-neck right-wing people with cows and stuff. How do we get along? Actually, pretty well. We all love the land and the rural ways even if we don’t live the same way. (Hippy-bus-cob-house vs. ranch house.) And there is even some morphing of ideals like hippies that ride horses and cowboys that grow pot. We call them hip-necks. (See vocab words)

But there are so few people that really live in nature, most live in Martha Stuart nature – like some trees and manicured lawns maybe a few flowers and usually some square bushes. This mind-numbing suburbia is pleasant but breeds an out-of-touch-myopic-self-serving mentality because there is no real feedback. Just like on Facebook you can live in your own private Idaho.

(If you have ever traveled through Idaho you can see where this song lyric comes from – imagine a dessert and then right in the middle of the dessert there is a square fenced green lawn and a Mc-mansion plopped right in the middle of no-where. Idaho -where the republican senators go to retire.)

Suburbia- we thought it would be the answer to all our troubles and pains but what it has created is a monstrous mass of ignorance. And that is the political divide.

Marx said that capitalism would lead to the rich having all the money and power and everyone else being left with not much so the educated would lead a revolt of the uneducated masses to take the money and power from the few and redistribute it more evenly hence, communism. But what he didn’t factor in was fox news or that the powerful few understood the issue and have spread mass propaganda that the ignorant, isolated, suburban masses would take in like water. That humans are hard wired to want to be in groups of like- minded people and have ideas that they can follow and agree upon, even if it leads to the destruction of life.

Diversity, inclusion, and environmentalism are harder concepts. They take more effort to do. So, Marx also did not factor in the comfortable suburban consciousness of humanity.

Nor did Marx factor in the real genius of the capitalist; to do things like control the media, control the justice system, entwine the disgruntled religious people who wanted more religion in schools and public areas into believing that Christ and capitalism and America are all the same thing, or how the capitalist move from being a CEO of a shyster company, to the professor of a prestigious university, to then being in politics creating a web of influence. These people can be very conniving.

So, what is a hippy to do? I guess just keep on being a hippie. It certainly is more fun and beautiful a lifestyle. We will keep on loving this Earth until it collapses and then, if anyone is still around, we will start to pick up the pieces. It will take generations to redesign a better, kinder, more in-touch world and hopefully we will abandon the dangerous ideas of capitalism, one religion, social striation by color of skin, progress, and suburbia.