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May 21, 2023·edited May 21, 2023Liked by Clayton Craddock

While I did indeed enjoy this, at every level, it still does not resonate well with my own direction taken for most of my life, since the various (and mostly geopolitical) 'energy crises' of the early seventies had left me agreeing mostly with Tower of Power's hit song of the times: that there's only so much oil in the ground.

Maybe, it occurred to me then and still does with every waking minute, start learning to.... use less of it, and everything else nobody really NEEDS, in the bargain?

What the gas lines and license-plate-based rationing which occurred in southern California brought home to me was that no matter how much oil is still in the ground or isn't, the real question the middle class I already was so determined to escape was confronting, was one of how much gasoline was in the pumps, in their own neighborhoods.

It wasn't until the overnight emergence in pop culture of 'fossil fuels' as dirty words that anyone began to be concerned overmuch with where it had come from, or what it took to get it on the market and into the local gas station. And even then, the newly-trendy cursing of 'fossil fuels' wasn't based on any rhetoric containing any references to 'climate change' nor even its early trial-run version as 'global warming'.

These newly crafted environmentalist arguments against fossil fuels had more to do with factors like toxic runoff, destruction of habitats, the health hazards of air pollution etc, at first, then were later folded in with various post-Vietnam strivings to have some new super-cause to unite a fractured left, which had found itself lacking any singular uniting principle as straightforward as 'stop the war' had been misinterpreted as being... indeed a straightforward one at all.

For years the war in Vietnam had served as a reliable coalition-builder of a large-scale dissident faction, wherein everyone from feminists to civil-rights activists to draft-objectors to tribal-sovereignty advocates to pink-revolutionists to ordinary communist-sympathizers could all, for the time being, sing from the same hymnal called 'Stop the War.'

But by 1973, when OPEC decided to try a new price-gouging strategy on an unprecedented scale, there was no longer much left to protest about, in the old time-tested antiwar direction.

The boys were coming home, the B52 campaigns had ended (more or less), and even the hated Nixon presidency was on its last legs and on the verge of failure. No more draft, abortion was now legal, an America for-whites-only was gradually beginning to become a tad more colorful. The protesters could now claim that things they'd had little to do with actually implementing had come about because they'd sang songs and carried signs for a while during college, and thus begin a whole new era of baby-boom prominence and revisionist self-congratulation based on this entirely fallacious mythology, an era which has not yet ended to this day.

But what can we hold rallies in the street about now?, wondered the American left in '73 and going forward.

There was no such term as 'woke' even on any distant horizon as yet, there was no singular uniting factor to convince new generations that to protest things, whatever things came to mind, was a way of life worth living any more.

Even twenty years of attending several boring and predictable Grateful Dead concerts per year wasn't getting this done for more than an elite caste of middle-class escapees, all of whom had been raised to believe they'd somehow missed out on the most important era in history, those all-knowing and all-saving Sixties when Mom and Dad had stopped a war....

How to get that feeling back? How to make legions of bored and prosperous youngsters believe that chanting slogans and ridiculing public figures is a far better investment of their youth, than paying attention in class and striving to excel at their chosen paths in life?

The barely-noticeable side effect of sixties protest culture, the 'get back to the land' ethos, had managed only to inspire a handful of other middle-class escapees to buy cheap land in the Ozarks and Taos County, New Mexico and the Great North Woods for a few years. But it had turned out that small groups of insiders are the only ones who do all the work running small-town food co-ops, while everyone else just enjoys the discounts on organic buckwheat and the counterculture prestige of shopping there, and that their kids hate organic buckwheat and want Froot Loops instead, and to have a badass car, instead of groveling dusk-to-dawn down some back road in a semi-derelict shack to keep tanks stocked mosquito-free with rainwater and old batteries charged with solar panels, while the kids in town go to the movies and have cool parties, dressed in style.

How any of this was meant to save the world from anything or cause everyone to love one another was pretty much lost on that next generation, who tended more toward selling drugs and joining gangs, to save up enough to get the hell out from under all that boring drudgery someday.

In short, a rebellion without a cause is a deep dilemma for those in the business of sustaining rebellion indefinitely, even with no more than the vaguest goals in mind. Vague as the goals may be, and always are, there still need to be unifying causes to write slogans and make radical speeches about, or else all the protest-inclined might fracture into too many little self-interested and mutually hostile factions to keep them all organized, and marching reliably in the same (political!) direction.

Where the mantra of 'woke' ever came from at first is a matter of debate, and I personally could not care less. Nor take it seriously at all.

How I read it is that a causeless left in permanent search of a cause has finally managed to simply invent one, with a singular term of no clear meaning held up by much repetition as meaning whatever a given dissident faction wants it to mean, and for the first time in generations managed to get its useful idiots in the streets convinced that they are now back in the business of saving everybody from something, or whatever.

That they won't, can't, never have, nor ever will save anyone or fix anything by indulging in the ancient practice of denouncing and persecuting anyone who strays from the current orthodoxy, never needs to occur to them. Those to whom it does, get on with their lives, on terms of their own making.

I can at least praise the speaker at Oxford here, for making the effort to do just that, even while observing for myself that his own preferred middle-class values had been such a huge obstacle to any better world from where I sit, all along.

I still cannot go to an international airport or big stadium, or listen to anyone bragging about their overseas vacations and bitchen ski trips, without my mind running the calculations on how many resources they used, and wondering, and for what?

Is it not possible, perhaps even morally defensible, for the well-off to just accept that more of every goddamn gimmick and luxury they can get their hands on is not really more at all, of anything besides more servicing of implanted compulsions which don't really make anyone more happy?

One doesn't need to revert to guilt-based abject peasant poverty to simply count one's blessings as they stand, and release oneself from all the urges to be bored with them all and always be out for new ways to be bored with each new form of excess.

I was never under the delusion that counting my own blessings or striving to appreciate what I have, instead of always be questing for more, was going to save the world from anything. But for my own purposes such a value system has gone far in saving myself, from the excess, envy and avarice surrounding me in those godawful middle-class settings I'd always found so repulsive, before I managed to leave them behind forever.

I do get what the speaker was saying, that the poor will always want not to be poor any more. But why can the well-off never be satisfied with what they already have?

Maybe if the prosperous could recognize that it is they who set the standards, for what a better life might look like to the poor, the examples they set might actually someday be more.... sustainable ones?

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