Memoirs Of An Aging Hippie

I stamped on the brakes hard. Thanks to ABS my car stopped within inches of the car in front. Close! I wiped the offending tears from my eyes. The tears that had nearly brought me to grief. They had flowed naturally and spontaneously as I listened to a speaker on the radio describing how a family of five young children had watched their mother die slowly and horribly over a period of several months. She was all they had. Their father had gone, and now she was going. They did what they could to ease her suffering, to deal delicately with the indignities she had to endure. And when she finally drew her last agonising breath and left her wasted, skeletal, broken body, they were alone. Yet another sibling family.
The place is any number of countries in Africa. The disease is of course HIV/AIDS. The speaker was Stephen Lewis the UN Secretary General’s Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa. A new orphan is created every 14 secs.
There is no welfare system to support them. Most of their adult relatives have already died or are struggling to cope with the symptoms. For these children, there is no one to give parental love and care, tell them a story or tuck them up in bed at night. No more mothering, no kissing better of a scrazed knee. Nothing but an empty space where mummy and daddy used to be.
Today, over 11 million children under the age of 15 living in sub-Saharan Africa have been robbed of one or both parents by HIV/AIDS. Seven years from now, the number is expected to have grown to 20 million. At that point, anywhere from 15 per cent to over 25 per cent of the children in a dozen sub-Saharan African countries will be orphans – the vast majority of them will have been orphaned by HIV/AIDS.
Children as young as 10 or 11 take on the roles of mother or father. In some cases courageous grandparents can fill in the gap, but often they are no longer around.
If you are reading this then you live in a developed country. HIV/AIDS is a problem but not a pandemic. This is because your society has access to drugs, condoms and education. The Africans, still reeling from the disruption to their old orders by European colonization, have not.
These citizens of Africa are, at heart, no different to you and I. Like you and I they have known grief and pain, like you and I they have known joy and happiness, like you and I they have known love. And like you and I they need food, shelter and a chance to be the best they can be. Right now they are doing the best with what they’ve got.
We are all a part of the human race. Why then do we, through the governments we elect and the huge corporations whose products we buy, refuse to lend our fellow humans a helping hand?
They do their best to help themselves.
Stephen Lewis visited a remote farm run by a group of women who were brave enough to declare openly that they were living with HIV/AIDS. They had banded together and ran a market garden producing cabbages, which they sold at a nearby market. Stephen asked them what they did with the surplus money they generated. There was an awkward silence. They couldn’t believe that the answer wasn’t obvious. “We buy coffins ….. there are never enough coffins.
We, as a society, spend ever-increasing amounts of money on distractions and more efficient ways of killing each other, but pay no regard to the indescribable suffering of our fellow human beings. Not much money at all will go a long way to providing drugs to help reign in the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Not much money at all would pay school fees and provide food and although I don’t know how to do it, money must surely be applied to giving love, comfort and practical support to the millions of children who have been forced to take over the family responsibilities of their dead parents.
And what are we doing about it? Well WE, and that is all of us because WE voted in the current regime of western politicians, are doing nothing. I’m not sure how many billions are being spent on wars in the Middle East and the machinery of war in other parts of the world. But I do know that it massively exceeds what is being spent to aid our fellow human beings.
As Archbishop Desmond Tutu says, “We are one world and these children are our children. Their fate is our fate, each of us can make a difference. Everyone can help to save lives.”
You, the reader, have the power to do something. Visit the Stephen Lewis Foundation website at http://www.stephenlewisfoundation.org and decide how you can help. Our governments and our corporations have so far, not been forthcoming. We are all members of the human race. Let’s act with humanity.

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

Global AIDS Alliance www.globalaidsalliance.org
Global Action for Children www.globalactionforchildren.org

I often wonder what life would be like if the Luddites hadn’t failed in their attempt to humanise progress. But unfortunately they couldn’t win. For starters they weren’t an actual organised entity, just a collection of individuals who stood to loose most from, what was later termed, the Industrial Revolution. They were up against those with the capital, the British government, (predominately the same people), the British Army and the Police Force. Even so it took hastily drafted draconian laws, quite a few hangings and a lot of violence to quell them.
We are living with their defeat today. It’s why we travel in peak hour droves to a place of work where we exchange large slabs of our lives for money.
Before the industrial revolution there was an organic economy based on land, labour and local exchange.
The weavers of the north of England were largely one-person home businesses. Apart from producing woven goods, often with the involvement of his family, the weaver also had a small self-sufficient family vegetable garden. Because of the quality and the demand for his manufactured goods, he was always assured that everything he produced would be sold at a constant price. He and his family had abundance, stability and unrestrained social interaction.

Technology allowed the manufacture of goods, although inferior in quality, independent of nature, of geography and season and weather, of sun or wind or water or human and animal power. It produced an economy based upon fuel, factory and foreign trade. Humans became a minor consideration in the manufacture of goods and were now serving the machine.
It was this uncontrolled empowerment of the machine in human society that the Luddites fought against.

The people who formed the Luddite movement were mainly weavers or similar craftsmen. They had the most to loose. They fought for and lost their idyllic cottage industry lifestyle of stability and self-reliance. The very lifestyle that a lot of us yearn for today.
The combined power of weaving machines, the steam engine, the laws of enclosure that enabled industrialists to fence off farming land and build factories, put an end to the weavers way of life. Whereas before the factories, agreed customary prices and therefore income were stable, the new technology brought with it a free market economy, which drove prices and wages down along with the quality of the product.

Life for the displaced farmers and weavers forced into the urban factories had become grim. Working for long hours in dangerous conditions with no days off for very low pay, men, women and children spent their lives either working or sleeping. Several families would have to share one house to save on rent. Humans had become a disposable adjunct to the machine. This is what the Luddites and those before them were against.

History is written by the victors, who were obviously not the Luddites, which is how the word has come to be used to mean a stupid person who doesn’t understand and is opposed to advances in technology. They were in fact very perceptive. They could see what was going to happen to humanity.
And they were right. Despite their valiant opposition we now have a collective mindset that says we must have a JOB and go to WORK for some one else. It is now taken for granted that production and technological progress is more important than being human.
There was a brief time, with the advent of computers, that we all entertained the idea that computers would handle the more mundane tasks of modern life such that the working week would be reduced to three or four days, maybe less. It’s what the Luddites would have supported. Didn’t happen. The increased capacity that computers gave us was simply used to produce more not improve humanity. The amount of time many office workers spend away from home at a JOB has actually increased.

Interestingly a totally unplanned result of computer technology has given some people a chance to recreate the weaver’s lifestyle. I’m referring to the internet. There are those that have replaced the loom with the computer and yarn with broadband. They have offices in their homes where they can interact with their families, live in a country environment and grow vegetables and keep chickens should they choose. As for products they range from selling information to buying and selling on e-bay, trading in stocks and shares to advertising.
Thanks to appropriate technology, we have the opportunity to conduct business whilst packing the kids off to school, planting the spinach, feeding the chickens and maybe an afternoon delight between Google-ads.
Used this way the computer can give us more free time and at last live up to it’s promise.

It’s not much but I’m sure that the mythical Nedd Ludd would approve.

This Book Has More Information On Luddites

I had a South African girlfriend once. Not a girlfriend in the way that she was the total focus of my attention in the traditional courting sense. But, never the less, she’s etched ever gentle on my mind. Her name was Reg. Short for Regina. No! Really. Well if you had a name like that, wouldn’t you want to change it?. Stunning girl. She wasn’t really classically beautiful or pretty. She was more statuesque in the Greek sense and she had the most enormous breasts with inverted nipples. Never seen any thing like it since. The nipples became non inverted when she was aroused. How do I know? Come on! it was the sixties! Sex, drugs and rock and roll. Personally I never bothered with the drugs, unless you include alcohol, in which case I did quite a bit of bothering. As for sex, in those days the contraceptive pill was newly available and there was no such thing as HIV aids, so the worst that could happen was some form of STD that could be treated. Make love not war was the motto. Halcyon days! Or quite often daze. Rock and roll, well although of course I was definitely into music of the time, Hendrix, Led Zepplin, Pink Floyd, The Beatles, Rolling Stones etc., my favourite music was New Orleans Jazz of the traditional variety from the 20s and 30s. On a Friday night my friends and I would journey to a pub called “The Fox & Hounds” in a village outside of my home town of Brighton. We’d drink cider and dance all night long. The dance was called a skip jive. It was like a rock and roll jive except that you skipped at the same time. It was very energetic and I could do it without pause. Mind you I was only nineteen.

Anyway back to Reg.
It was a most unusual and somewhat casual relationship, mainly because she was so incredibly intelligent, far beyond my comprehension. I think she must have regarded me as some sort of ‘toy boy’, although we were the same age.
At the time I had a sports car. It was a Triumph TR3A. It was magnificent. It was British racing green. It was the last of the true old fashioned sports cars with a big souped up tractor engine and a driver’s seat almost over the back wheels. At 70 mph the engine was only doing 3,000 rpm. You could drop the clutch at the traffic lights without touching the accelerator and it would pull away. It was ….. groovy.

I remember taking Reg driving on windy English country roads impressing her with my masculine driving expertise and knowledge. “See that line of telegraph poles” I said, “although I can’t see where the road is I know that it will follow the telegraph poles so I can drive accordingly”. The line of telegraph poles went straight ahead over the brow of the hill. The road, on the other hand, went sharp left and took a completely different route. She said “I’m suitably impressed”. I stated the absolutely flaming obvious. “You can see right through me, can’t you?” A reply was superfluous. Still, she loved going driving because back in South Africa she also had a Triumph TR3A. We talked of philosophy, of sports cars and esoteric concepts and her anger of the lop sided news from South Africa where no one ever heard of the brave white politicians who put themselves in the firing line everyday to oppose apartheid. She was learned, eloquent, an artist and like so many geniuses she was schizophrenic.

I didn’t realise it initially. Then, one night when I met her at a party, she was wild she was ebullient, she was electric and she invited to sleep with her. What was a young hippy to do? I was groovy with shoulder length hair, a beard, wearing platform shoes, flare trousers and a really cool leather jacket. I had just finished playing a set of Bob Dylan and Buddy Holly songs on my guitar. I was hot. So naturally I said “You and me babe”, and relaxed into the night.

She screamed out “Thank you God!” when she came and when we awoke in the morning said to me, “What are you doing here?” Very confusing for a simple young lad.
Anyway, for some reason, she latched onto me in a casual sort of a way, or at least I suppose one of her did. She would come and stay with me sometimes and likened herself to the protagonist in the Chris Christofersson song ‘Forever Gentle On My Mind’.

One day after she had stashed her sleeping bag behind my couch for the night she announced she was going back home to South Africa. Seems that a psychiatrist was trying to tell her she was schizophrenic. There was an awkward pause. Do I say “No of course not, they must have it all wrong”. Or do I tell the truth as I experienced it. It was difficult. I opted for the truth and related the story of the time I woke up in her bed and she didn’t remember inviting me. Well she wouldn’t, she wasn’t the same person I met the night before.

She left shortly after that, full of love and appreciation and I never heard from her again. I often wonder what happened to her. I think of her whenever South Africa is mentioned and whenever I hear “Forever Gentle On My Mind”.
I don’t think she was taking the pill. Maybe I’ve got family in South Africa.