Down on the Farm

By the time Mayday was happening, I had joined up with a group of spiritual non-violent hippies headed in a caravan of school buses for Tennessee to buy some land and set up the Farm. We were not allowed to stop in the state of Kansas because the cops there thought we were all political radicals headed for DC.

You said you "were not allowed to stop in Kansas" by the police on Mayday '71. How did you know? Did they stop your car and tell you that you weren't welcome on the state?

OK, long story. Around the New Year of 1971 I joined up with a group of non-violent spritual hippies that had just completed a grand tour of the US following their "guru," a guy named Stephen Gaskin. He was invited to speak on the subject of non-violence by ministers all over the country. He and his family travelled in a converted school bus. Many of those who had attended his lectures in San Francisco wanted to come along on his tour and he invited them to come as examples of his philosophy. So "the Caravan," as it was called, travelled during the fall of 1970 promoting an alternative to the political anger and violence that was drawing people like me into it. I was prime for just that alternative and when the Caravan came through D.C., I visited with some of its members.

I caught up with the Caravan again when it passed through L.A. in January and rode with it back to S.F. It was there that the members of the Caravan decided to travel back to Tennessee where land was cheap and the people were less jaded on longhairs than they were in S.F. The Caravan back to Tennessee was the occasion of our being denied the right to stop and rest in Kansas. We were about 100 vehicles and over 300 people then. For some reason, they thought that we presented a threat to the state; that we were political. Other states had extended welcomes and police escorts to help us find places to park our mobile village. Not Kansas. As we rolled on toward Oklahoma, cars full of reporters pulled up alongside our buses and shouted questions to us. We did interviews at 55 mph.

You said, "The War set me off on a course that few others followed. It so disillusioned me about America and its values and lifestyle that I dropped out completely, ended up living as a voluntary peasant on the Farm for 12 years and only dropped in so far as to work for Whole Earth during the 80s." I would like to know more about the ways in which you became disillusioned. It sounds like a lengthy, involved process to me. How did it take place?

After graduating from U of M, I went to New Haven with a few of my high school buddies for the summer. One of my friends had gone to Yale and he wanted us to start a magazine that would effectively present radical politics in language palatable to the mainstream. It would have probably ended up like Mother Jones. But we didn't get anything off the ground. Instead, we got involved with the Bobby Seale trial that was going on there at the time. The Panthers wanted us to be their allies, but they held us in contempt because we were white. New Haven was a very uptight scene. Near the end of the summer I did a heavy dose of acid at an outdoor rock concert somewhere in New England. After that trip, I knew that politics and violence were going nowhere. I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I was leaning heavily in the hippie direction, ready to drop out if I could find a place to drop IN to.

If you were disillusioned, how did you feel about the factions who wanted to overthrow the American government?

I knew that violence was not the direction I wanted to go. I figured that if I lived in America, I would live an alternative lifestyle because we had the room and the freedom to do that if we did it with enough of us. I became a part of the counter culture.

Last of all, you say, "I was one of the founding directors of The WELL and kept my countercultural beliefs alive through managing that system into what it became. I still refuse to buy in to the American Dream." That is a very interesting statement. How does the WELL still house the counterculture's values? You don't want to "buy in to the American Dream." However, you don't sound like a nihilist to me. I think your antiwar experiences have replaced the traditional values given to young Americans with a new set of values.

I lived for 12 years at the Farm without earning a penny for myself. I left there in 1983 with five kids and no savings or possessions at age 34. I worked at Whole Earth for another nine years for low wages. I now have about $10K salted away and I own a 15-year-old car. Big deal. I don't think I can be described as a follower of the American Dream by those standards.

I could get a high-paying job now at Pacific Bell if I wanted it, but I refuse to work within a bureaucracy. I want to know exactly who my work is helping. I don't own a suit and I might wear a tie once a year. I still stay in touch with some of my ex-neighbors from the Farm. Some of them are very well off. Most live modestly. And most still have their ideals. I would not be surprised if many of us end up living on shared land again before we die.

I think you dropped out to search for a NEW American Dream. Do you agree?

I agree, but bringing about a more democratic society begins at the level of what you can actually affect. The WELL was grown as a very democratic online society where the customers took part in designing the system both technically and ethically. Even the millionaire who now owns the WELL must put up with public debate about his every move in trying to turn the WELL into a large network of regional systems with a graphical interface. The culture of the WELL is one of the things I am most proud of having been involved with.

I think your comments about the Farm suggest to me that your disillusionment over the American Dream is really a recognition that it isn't the American Dream, at all. It's some kind of cruel parody of what it was like originally, and "we've just got to get ourselves back to the garden" (as Joni Mitchell said). The calls for revolution then were close to the rationale for rebellion that Jefferson wrote into the Declaration of Independance. I'll bet the Farm's original principles looked a whole lot like the principles our founding fathers ascribed to. Am I wrong? Were we then (or are we now) just trying to grab hold of the _original_ American Dream?

The Farm's principles were based on Zen teachings, teachings of Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Hermes, and every wise person who uttered the true lessons of life and living down through the ages. We didn't have a charter or a written code of rules. We had what we called Agreements that we discovered through comparing what had been observed and agreed on by all the world's major religions as being the real guidelines for humans living together. Boiled down, they amounted to the Golden Rule. It was amazing to us how far human systems of government had strayed from this simple rule and how thoroughly compromised politics as usual had become.

You have been searching for a new American Dream since everything got unstuck during Vietnam. This is a good time for upbeat parting thoughts. What kind of new American Dream do you envision? What kind of values do you think will (or should) be important to 21st century America? Do you even envision an America in the 21st century?

The American political machine is even further alienated from the public than it was in the Sixties. There is far more skepticism now than there was then. That's good. But there is now a cynicism in place that I think prevents even sincere and well-meaning politicians from making changes for the better. America has set standards now that it cannot possibly reach for standard of living for all of its people. There is and will increasingly be frustration from the shrinking middle class and from the growing lower class over the inability to improve one's lot in America. There is simply not enough affluence to go around and still the politicians promise that if some simple remedies are put in place, we will all be satisfied. That is bunk. Creativity in lifestyle is the best solution for many of us. We must learn to live with less, cooperate with each other on the grassroots level to a greater degree, communicate and build communities in the real world and in the electronically-networked world. We no longer have the Soviet Boogieman to blame for all our ills. But we must recognize that we are a part of a global system and that we must learn to live in ways that can best be shared with the rest of the world. Striving for the good life in America is a wasteful and destructive path.

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