Post empire survival guide: creating a counterculture

Sam Smith – Seventeen years ago, John Leland wrote a piece for the NY Times - A Movement, Yes, but No Counterculture – that still rings true today. Said Leland:

“Three and a half decades ago, protesters massed with a political goal -- to end a war -- but also out of a conviction that many of the values undergirding American society were flawed: 1950's conformity, the materialistic rat race, racism, and even monogamy and the nuclear family. The alternative values they expressed through fashion, music, sexual mores and other lifestyle choices seemed to propose an entirely different world. And many historians feel that this counterculture shaped America more profoundly and for years longer than the stop-the-war rallies.

“But as protesters came together across the country last week, with a few radical contingents disrupting cities or destroying property, so far there has been little sense that they also shared a common desire to remake the country's values and institutions.”

As editor of the one of the early members of what became known as the underground press, I have been feeling a similar gap these days. We are constantly reminded of what is wrong but without a good sense of what a cured society might look like.

I am reminded of this vacuum each time I see the 1960s peace symbol on the bedroom door of my teenaged granddaughter.  Where is the symbol of 2020 and where the hell is our music?

I learned early on that a counterculture had to come from the young. Back then you weren’t meant to trust anyone over 30, an age I turned in 1967 and was three times suspected of being an undercover cop at rallies. Fifty years later it’s certainly not a problem I can solve but I scan the news every morning in hope of finding some voices showing us how to live without the pain and brutality of our time. And giving us a new song to sing.