We really have become fragmented as we all cope in this culture of me-first selfishness that seems to have engulfed us. It's hard to pinpoint at exactly which point that we started really going sideways. Dumping Christianity in the wastebin certainly hasn't helped. This isn't to say that we were once a perfect, loving and virtuous Christian culture either, but there is something about throwing out the baby with the bathwater and that is something that most of us always seem to excel at.
I do remember a time when we seemed less afraid of each other. Kinder and more trusting. During the summer of 1970, I was fourteen and exploring Vancouver on my own, taking the bus in from Richmond every day, and focussing primarily on the downtown area, the West End, Gastown and Stanley Park. I was an adventurous, curious and rather bold sort of kid. I was not shy about engaging with strangers. I wasn't yet getting around hitchhiking, and Mom made sure I had bus fare every day. While in the West End, someone called out to me from an apartment window and invited me to visit him and his friend in their first floor apartment. They were both in their thirties, drinking beer and there was a poster of a butterfly on the wall. They were friendly, curious about who I was, and I must have spent almost an hour just chatting randomly with these two strangers. Then, I thought I should get on with my day, as I was on my way to Stanley Park. It was all good. I never saw those guys again, but it still feels as though I made two new friends.
During the seventies, it seems that we all got around by hitchhiking. It was easy. Not really that dangerous, even if some guys behind steering wheels could get rather creepy at times. I do remember unwelcome hands trying to wander along my thigh, and one loser who decided to fully masturbate while driving me home to Richmond. He did pull over to the side of the road somewhere on Steveston Highway in order to finish the act. He was kind of good looking, actually, I was seventeen, but still I felt totally freaked and creeped out and thought that if that was the fare exacted for the ride, then surely there must be better ways for getting around. But it was late at night, and I had about fifteen miles to travel and no bus fare. I was staying with my father at the time, who was better off and less generous than Mom. Anyway, that is something I never told either of my parents about. I even feel somewhat creepy writing here about it some forty-six years later.
But that was the very worst thing that happened to me while hitchhiking. Then around 1980 or so, that monster Clifford Robert Olsen was caught and convicted and thrown into permanent protective custody after leaving a trail of broken juvenile bodies behind, most of them kids he had picked up hitchhiking. Suddenly everyone was taking the bus. Or Mommy and Daddy were chauffeuring them all over the place.
But other things were also at play. Our governments were being controlled by corporations and particularly odious noxious politicians were running and getting elected. The economy ruled, greed became god, and still rules, and social spending, affordable housing and poverty reduction plans were all clawed back or eliminated, and suddenly it was people living on the street and everyone for themselves. Through the eighties it was all about shopping, acquisition, greed, selfishness. And all psychotherapies became centered round the precious and sacred self. I had such a psychiatrist for four years, and even he couldn't convince me to turn into the kind of selfish narcissistic monster that has become the norm today.
If we are simply going to stay focussed on ourselves and our own sensory gratification, if we want to exist as a seething welter of pleasure seeking reptiles virtually unconscious of everything except our own pleasure, then we are sure to fail as a viable species, because humans are by nature social and connected with each other. What has been happening in our world these past fifty years is completely anti-human, and in our struggles against environmental damage and human caused climate change we are also going to have to consider becoming less selfish and more empathic or we are all screwed. We will be no better than that idiot masturbating and jerking off while driving me home late one summer night in 1973!
Kumbaya, anyone? Great song, and it's time for us to learn to sing it without irony.
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