Long Hair, No Hair, White Hair and Frontal Lobes

 

My first protest was in 1969 as a freshman in college taking the bus with classmates to the Vietnam War protest in Washington DC. Also in college, I began doing yoga and then later sitting zazen, started playing and listening to jazz, encountered the Orff teacher who would change my life, took my first backpacking trip, took a poetry class about Yeats, Frost and e.e.cummings, toured Europe with the college chorus singing Medieval Masses.  All of these ended up shaping and defining the next 50 + years of my life.

 

I was most definitely part of the “don’t trust anyone over 30” club and over the years gradually saw the problems with youth without fully-developed frontal lobes leading the charge without many elders by our side. As Abbie Hoffman described it (and this quoted in the above book):

 

“We were young. We were arrogant. We were ridiculous. There were excesses. We were brash. We were foolish. We had factional fights.”

 

And then concludes:

 

But we were right.

 

Now me and my other long-haired companions are now white-haired or bald. Yet still we’re out on the streets speaking out for what was right then, what is right now and what will be right forever. People over profits, living in harmony with nature over strip-mined/ slashed/ fracked domination, celebrating the diversity of race, gender, class, sexual preference rather than marginalizing and oppressing those “different” and more. You know the list. Or at least, you should. 

Had Abbie lived long enough to join us in the recent protests, I might have now written:

Now we are old. We are humble. We are dignified. We live moderately. We are confident in our convictions. We are wiser. We are more accepting of each other. 

And we are still right.