Where is Everyone?

Where is Everyone?
© Copyright, Frank W. Andres, 1983, 2012, 2015.

They were philosophers, gurus. They smoked their weed, settled back
with drinks and talked of the world. There was a philosophy. There was a
faith. Actually, the pot powwows were antecedents, of sorts… precursors of a
world they hoped would exist some day. Woodstock was a national
manifestation of this philosophy. There was hope for real Love between
brother and sister. Affinal groups sprang forth. Children ran naked under the
watch of their ‘uncles’ and ‘aunts’. They talked their talk, sometimes with the
help of great books,… usually not. Somehow there was the faith that if one
talked enough, even babbled enough, wrote enough… truth somehow would
emerge. This was inherited from the Beats.

But it all dissipated in a cloud of smoke. Now in the 1990’s there are no
hippies left…except for me. And I never felt a part of all that. Ironically I,
the non-participant, absorbed everything and continued the work…
developing 12-tone scale music, working on answers to intellectual problems,
answers to real problems…working in a systematic manner to help solve
problems that those dazed minds in the past…thought they were considering.
Like Annie Lennox, naked, in tears, crouched on a bare floor, singing a
‘Whiter Shade of Pale’… a song whose lyrics are stream of
consciousness….the type of strategy the Beats felt would lead to truth…welI,
she sings such a song, looking around and asking, ‘Where is everyone?’
Where did they go? Where did all that faith in a process go?’…Everything
from that era has disappeared … Even the songs from that age that chanted
the hippie faith: ‘He’s my Brother,’ Thunderclap Newman… are never played.
Like Annie…I am alone, sad, yet hopeful. Somehow the past will spark and
begin the conflagration promised by those times. There was no revolution…
instead everyone put on a suit and tie…and joined the corporation. Then all
that crumbled. Now everyone works at McDonald’s. Yes, perhaps in a way
evolution has replaced revolution, away from highly paid do-little jobs…now replaced by computers… everything is now falling from the top, downward,falling from the city…towards the land…and, according to the hippie
equation, I guess…hopefully, towards Love.