We'll Settle Down Some Day
We were all pretty exuberant, but we knew we'd settle
down somehow. Become respectable. But we'd always have our ideals.
Well, the joke was on me. I turned around one day in, oh, 1977 or so, to
find that there was no community any more, that one by one my comrades
had sneaked off to become middle managers in multinational corporations and
drive VW rabbits. Apparently it was for the most part just one big party.
I dunno--the revolution sure made a lot of sense to me. We said that capitalism
was a culture of death--and we were right. I never had an easy time in the
movement. I read the Wall Street Journal (and still do). I figured that
if we were really going to smash the state it behoved us to understand how
it worked, and then maybe play with it a little bit first. I was a planner
(and still am). And as I traveled around to various communes, all invariably
in advanced stages of decay and despair, it became clear to me that just
having your head in a really good place and watching the sun set was not
what anyone could call a sustainable economy. I liked motorcycles, and
computers, and modern medicine. I did not really want to relegate myself--and
my entire generation--to eking out a subsistence living tilling a gravelly
garden with a stone adze. And that seemed to be the only alternative
proposed--or else the Stalinist solution of simply take over the factories
and run them just like the pigs did. My alienation was not just from
the status quo.
Select this to read [the Whole Story].
