The Beat Goes On

Today is the birthday of American writer Jack Kerouac. 

I was busy having babies and trying to mimic Donna Reed during the provocative 60’s, so I pretty much slept through it. Chasing after two rambunctious boys left me too worn out to focus on anything more serious than Pablum. For all I knew, the Beat Generation that Kerouac wrote about was a group of tired women not unlike myself, and the Hippies were people born with unfortunate hips.

Jack Kerouac. Ken Kesey. Neal Cassady. Allan Ginsburg. William Burroughs.

While I was changing diapers and making formula, Jack Kerouac, in a multi-colored, psychedelic bus loaded up his friends and took his first cross-country trip. He called that trip, Further, but Tom Wolfe later named it, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. I didn’t know squat about any of it. Long-haired hippies lived in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, not in my little corner of the world. By the time I was in a position to boogie with the Grateful Dead, I was too old to dance.

A few years later, I awakened from my civic narcolepsy and did something totally foreign to the person I had been: I marched in protest against the war. My rebellion did little more than guarantee my name and photograph to be forever embedded in a folder at FBI headquarters, but I was proud of myself for having done something. After recovering from the initial shock of breaking with tradition, that one act of defiance allowed me to see that it was okay to think outside of the Pablum Package.

About that same time, Ken Kesey took me on a journey inside of his head ~ not a psychedelic road trip, and a much shorter one than he ever took. His movie, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was the dawning of the Age of Aquarius for me, my Aha Moment. 

For middleclass Americans like myself ~ those of us brought up in or before the 50’s, Jack Nicholson’s role in the film was that of a crazy man. Even though for years I had behaved more like June Cleaver than June Cleaver, I didn’t see Mac McMurphy as crazy. It wasn’t just another award-winning role for Nicholson. To me, McMurphy was the brave kid on the playground standing up to the class bully. I saw the wretched Nurse Ratched as the bully, McMurphy’s antithesis. God knows how, but that film showed me a different view of the power structure going head-to-head with the counter-culture and anti-establishment groups. 

There’s no doubt that we are all guilty of taking freedom for granted. We’re like kids given too many toys at Christmas so that none of them are special. Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters hoped that their message, as drug-induced as they likely were, would resuscitate an apathetic people. For sure, the arrested childhood of the counter-culture was a backward way to move forward, but they made waves and they made a difference. Pandora’s Box was opened up and cans of political worms wriggled out. Heroes have earned that title for doing less.

These days I don’t protest march or march with placards, but as an American citizen, I insist on my right to do so. I want to get back to the freedom of speech I used to know but have too often taken for granted. I need to trust that my right of peaceful assembly written in the First Amendment to the Constitution will always allow me to protest what I perceive as wrongdoing. I am not willing to forfeit that privilege and you shouldn’t either. The Constitution of the United States says we don’t have to.

We have been charged with a provocative edict: to uphold the visions set in motion when early Americans defied England over two hundred and forty years ago. If we are to make our dissenting forefathers proud, we cannot sleep through movements Black Lives Matter or ignore the gluttonous games played by corrupt officials. We cannot make our forefathers proud if we choose to do less. 

The Beat Goes On.