Author: cheriebell69@hotmail.com

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Pain management may lead to opioid addiction

Everyone is addicted to something: drugs, alcohol, sex, food.  This is a paraphrased quote from our ‘all too human’ former President Bill Clinton.  He used to tell us he felt our pain, so we elected him twice.  Then we discovered he was a serial womanizer and carried on with many affairs.  He was impeached essentially over his sex life.  But Clinton understood something about the human condition perhaps because he understood addiction.

Now that President Trump has declared the nation’s opioid crisis—with more deaths every day than car wrecks and gun deaths combined—maybe something can be done to save lives.  Last year 50,000 Americans died from this addiction, the great majority no doubt slipping into death unintentionally.  But drug deaths have been going on since, well, rock and roll: Jimi, Janis, Jim, then Elvis, later Michael, most recently Prince.  Their deaths were accidental, too.  They weren’t suicidal, just abusing drugs.  They were caught in a trap.  And at least two had money to seek modern-day treatment.  They couldn’t say they had no idea they were addicted to drugs.  They knew the game, played, and lost their lives—and in so doing caused a great deal of grief to their families and millions of fans around the world.

Something for the pain

Why do some people get addicted to drugs and others don’t?  Since the days of LSD, our scientists know so much more about addiction, brain chemistry, and genetics.  Will power may be a part of the equation.  Americans have a long history of cramming that thought down the throats of our loved ones, especially the older generations to the younger.  Still every day more and more people get hooked particularly on a cheap heroin derivative.  It might have started with an injury or surgery and some very effective pain pills.  The prescription ran out in a week or so and either was refilled by someone else or the street dealers came around or were pursued.  But when the addicted start committing crimes to support their habit, everyone knows the situation is deadly serious and must be stopped one way or another.

What is a family of an addict to do?  Television shows like “Intervention” chronicles such plights.  We are allowed to see how low the addicted go, how they have their daily plans to score dope, how they search their body for a vein that isn’t blown from overuse, how awful they look, how they lie and steal and prostitute as their lives are absolutely worthless … to them.  That’s the addiction, the sickness, the change in the brain.  And after addiction, through recovery they may find little joy in living the clean and sober life.  That is part of the price of addiction and sobriety.  Addictive drugs can rewire the brain’s pleasure sensors.

Science has taught us no one is really to blame for becoming addicted.  About the only thing we can do besides stop being judgmental is to be empathetic.  “Look, that could be me,” and with the right level of pain and new pain killers, anyone can get addicted.  That’s what the fear is about our latest drug crisis: It crosses every race, age, religion, and socio-economic level.  But the same was said about black tar heroin, then cheese, maybe even meth to some extent.

Comfortably numb

Pharmaceutical companies are being blamed for convincing doctors that pain management is true medical care nowadays.  Hah, what a laugh, based on my own experiences.  One of my doctors never refilled a pain killer used when passing a kidney stone.  The specific pain killer now is highly regulated with our government telling docs to avoid prescribing it altogether.  So I suffered through a day or two of horrific pain using over-the-counter alternatives that do not work.  I knew I’d live, however.  I knew the pain would go away.

In 1990 I underwent a state-of-the-art dental procedure to remove impacted wisdom teeth.  They were sideways and were never going to sprout, so I took the option which involved anesthesia.  The moment I awoke from the surgery, the pain was excruciating.  I was given a week’s supply of Percocet, which for me really didn’t alleviate the pain.  I cried myself to sleep every night, praying for the pain to go away.  But I could not imagine not taking that pain killer.  How much worse would the pain be, I feared.  Sure enough, when the pills were gone and I called the dentist for a refill, I was told to take Tylenol.  I knew Tylenol wasn’t going to relieve that level of pain.  So I suffered for another week or so of agonizing hellish pain; it felt like my teeth had been ripped from the roots.  And that’s exactly what had happened during the oral surgery.

What was never said to me was the pain will go away.  Now we are learning that doctors want us to experience pain after surgery because that indicates our bodies are healing.  Who knew?  I figured there were the old-school docs who wanted patients to ‘suck it up’ when it came to pain after procedures and the modern docs who sympathized (not unlike Bill Clinton) and would permit patients some sort of prescription pain reliever.  I guess we’re seeing the old-school docs were right all along.  Think back to the days before anesthesia (not that I would ever want to go back, so keep it coming).  Yet those old-timers, our forefathers, lived.  Perhaps we are made of tougher stock than we realize.  Maybe we’re going to have to start discovering our inner and outer toughness.

This latest drug epidemic involving opioids brought to mind a nurse I met who cared for terminal patients.  In 1994 she was speaking to hospitals nationwide to promote better pain management for patients in the end stage of a terminal disease.  Back then doctors were very reluctant to prescribe pain killers even for the dying.  This made no sense, as the good nurse said sarcastically, “Terminal pain is no time to be giving Tylenol 3.”  She also said something else a non-medical person like me—and most of us in the general population—would know: People don’t understand opioids can be increased indefinitely.

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Age brings wisdom to accept ourselves

How do we measure a year, asks the song from the musical Rent.  As I approach another birthday this month, I look back at not only this past year but all the many marks of time preceding it.  As we continue to live on, year after year, life is seen in a much bigger picture.  To me, life is marked in phases and stages.  It would be hard to explain how someone raised in a Dallas suburb ended up living in East Texas for many years and then traveled the world for education and pleasure.  But that is the wonderful thing about life: We never know what we’ll end up doing.  So, here’s to our personal adventure called Life!

Mine began humbly enough.  For three and a half years, I was the center of my parents’ undivided attention.  One of my earliest memories is our family of three moving into a new three-bedroom brick home.  I helped by carrying a mop and bucket in the house.  I remember the floor, though carpeted, felt hard as cement, which was its foundation.  My next early childhood memory was the day my brother was born.  In the hospital waiting room, while my dad was not watching, I managed to walk away until I was almost in the very room where my mother was giving birth.  I was stopped and pushed back to the waiting area by a nurse in white stockings and attire as they wore in those days.  Perhaps I heard my mother’s voice in labor and was searching to help her.

Next thing I knew, a party was held at our house with everyone coming to see the new baby.  The tiny creature was on top of my parents’ big bed.  He still had that skinny stem on his belly.  Feeling left out, I remained in the hallway then found myself carving my name on the wall.  What would Freud say?  For a few years, my name remained there until Dad paneled over it.  In those early sibling years, my brother and I shared the same bedroom.  But I saw myself as much, much older and ready for some independence: riding my big trike up and down sidewalks along the neighborhood street.  I asked to move into the guestroom, changing it into my own bedroom.  Some girls around my age moved into the house next door, and that’s where I liked to socialize and grow ever more independent.  We played Barbie’s a lot.

The next memorable milestone for me was my first day of school.  I had wanted to go to kindergarten, which was not required back then, but my parents could not afford it.  Instead because of my birth date in the fall, I had to wait an entire year before starting first grade.  I remember feeling the whole year was a complete waste of my time.  (What kinda kid was I anyway?)  My mother was a teacher at an elementary school where she arranged for me to attend.  On the first day of school, she walked me down a long corridor of lockers, then outside to the new modern wing for first and second grades, bent down and pointed at the glass doors and told me that was where I was to go to first grade.  My teacher came outside the door and the two ladies exchanged pleasantries as I walked inside by myself with enthusiasm and satisfaction and the real taste of freedom.  I had waited my whole life for this day!

But soon I would discover a few things about life and myself.  First, there are kids older than me, and they were tougher, too.  I was intimidated by them and yet could not wait to reach their big impressive ages.  Second, there were kids in my grade who were preordained to be popular.  And I was not one of them.  Looking back it seems somehow kids take one look at each other and just know upon meeting who’s well liked and who’s not.  What were we judging this on: the most stylish clothes and hairstyles, shoes, sophistication, charm school, parents with prestige and money?  How would we even know such things instinctively?  Who knows the psychology of a first-grader?  In time I would gladly accept my place as a product of middle-class blue-collar heritage.  Within a couple of years, I would learn to utilize that work ethic and make a name for myself in accomplishments that mattered to me: creative writing and performing on stage.

I won’t continue to bore with memories of junior high, high school, college and beyond, but suffice it to say, that thing about popularity is universal.  How a class of kids can be mesmerized by another person their own age is fascinating, and accurate.  You’d think the littlest ones among us would be the most sincere, able to discern the value of every peer and adult.  But kids are highly impressionable, more likely to chase after a person who seemingly glows on the inside and out.  Now with decades-old hindsight, I suppose seeing the way the world was made me more sarcastic and cynical toward my classmates, the cliques common in every school.  I never belonged to one.  Independence meant everything to me.  Besides, I liked sitting on the sidelines in observation and making the occasional sardonic quip to entertain the like-minded.

If we live long enough to mature with grace through many decades (crossing two centuries for me), then we come to realize the popular ones were just like the rest of us.  I wasn’t left out as much as I placed myself out of the white hot spotlight of school fame.  But I was critical of them, and I’ve lived to regret the way I was back then.  No doubt for some, popularity was a trap, attention and expectations never pursued.  What’s left behind for all of us are memories and pictures of beautiful kids with sparkling eyes, fabulous smiles, radiant glow and presumed successful life in all endeavors.  But the reality was and is every person has equal sorrow, hardship and loss along with love, accomplishment and success.  We of a certain age come to realize this about each other: Life may be hard but still can be and should be a joy.  If we live long enough, life gives us wisdom to understand ourselves and appreciate each other, then and now.

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Too late for gun debate?

We were warned against mentioning gun control following the Las Vegas massacre—to not refer to it as a massacre or a slaughter but just another mass shooting.  We were allowed to call it the deadliest in American history.  Then as I was leaving a parking lot at the end of the week, I saw three decals on the back of a vehicle: an assault rifle, an American flag in the shape of Texas, and a cross.  The stance celebrates freedom to have a military-style rifle; live in Texas, USA; and be counted as a follower of Christ.

Imagine Jesus Christ with an assault rifle or any gun.  That would go against everything he stood for.  He is the one who suggested when someone hurts us to turn the other cheek.  That is a reference to pacifism: to not fight, to allow yet another slap on the face or physical injury, even death.  Christianity is not a religion about being locked and loaded, ready for a fight, ready to use firearms, shoot if shot at.  It’s not a religion that permits possession of and carrying a sure-fire deadly weapon for personal safety.  Christianity is about going out into the world unarmed, with sincerity and faith, and most importantly being ready to suffer and die for religious beliefs.  But if Christianity and Jesus are going to be dragged into our American gun control debate, used as some proof of ultimate religious consecration, I’d go back to reading The Bible’s red-word-only sections.

Jesus did not carry a weapon to destroy his enemies.  The Romans, however, would have loved assault rifles.  It fits their renowned blood thirst and machismo, their insatiable need to prove their ultimate strength and brutality.  Perhaps the U.S. is modern-day Rome.

The National Rifle Association—with its scant lobbying funds compared to the Chamber of Commerce and pharmaceuticals—can be blamed but a little for our nation’s escalating mass shootings, now reaching slaughter in scope and carnage.  It’s not the NRA’s fault.  These shooting massacres are the fault of every American citizen.  Who the hell thought any private citizen should own military-style assault rifles, the kind that spray bullets and kill dozens in seconds flat?

When it comes to the general public and guns, I take the word of the police chiefs and sheriffs whose associations did not support concealed gun laws.  The seasoned officers tried to warn us a couple decades ago: Every and any body should not have a gun.  But that’s what has happened, all kinds of people getting powerful guns legally and otherwise.  And Americans don’t believe in having one firearm; there are enough guns in our nation for each and every one of us, infant to elderly.  That clearly means many Americans own more than one gun.

Somehow the American love of guns and high-powered rifles has got to wane.  Our fascination with guns has gotten us into so much trouble, brought on so much heartache, been the cause of more injuries and death especially among young people than almost any other cause statistically.  The NRA may have a valid point in blaming the most recent mass shooting on the movie industry.  With a body count of 59 and hundreds injured, the scenario is reminiscent of big-budget Hollywood action movies.  But … see, movies are fantasies; they’re not supposed to be reality.

Americans have loved guns for a long time.  Our forefathers may have thought it just and good for us all (well, white men of a certain age) to have a musket around the house to prevent Red Coats or any foreign figure from taking over our burgeoning nation or from preventing our own leader from declaring himself a dictator.  Maybe thinking if every property owner had one or two firearms, it would be really hard for a foreign army to kill us all and take over our new government back in the 1770s.  Well, we’re in the at-home assault rifles and nuclear age now.

There has been comic speculation about guns and man parts, as a reason why some men have to have so many powerfully large guns (to make up for a physical lack).  If so, that is proving some American men to be the head cases that would shoot people at malls, churches, concerts, etc., etc. and then himself.

If gun control cannot be a debate in 21st century America, if Americans just cannot deal with the thought of reconsidering at least military assault rifles, then we have no choice but to look inside the mind of our fellow citizens who own tons of guns.  The federal government does do that on occasion, and look what happens: Ruby Ridge, Waco and in retaliation Oklahoma City.  All of which proves my point: Americans are generally gun crazy.  And being that way and staying that way is just plumb crazy.

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Vietnam War documentary reveals truth, lies, loss and rue

It was the spring of 1980.  I was a high school junior in American history.  After spending six weeks on World War I, another six weeks on World War II, a week on the Korean War, finally we were going to learn about the Vietnam War.  I could not wait.  The whole hippie ’60s era of which I had little recollection fascinated me.  The teacher began to talk about the reasons for our involvement in Vietnam while our youthful eyes wandered around the room to study black-and-white pictures of the times of which he spoke: American combat soldiers on patrol in the jungle; that famous scene of a teen-age girl wailing over the dead body of an anti-war protester; impoverished Vietnamese villagers; war protesters placing flowers in the rifles of riot police.  What a mass of confusion.  Complex.  Intense.  Crazy.

As I recall, the history lesson on Vietnam was rather abbreviated.  Odd, considering this war was much longer than the world wars and certainly more controversial.  It had just ended five years ago.  I wanted to know all about the war protesters, the draft, the bumper sticker “Pray for our POWs and MIAs”—so much to learn from just awhile ago.  To the history teacher, it must have seemed like another lifetime, so much had changed.  Yet the ’60s was the era I wished I had been a part of (at 17 already summarizing the rest of the ’70s as boring musically and socially).  Bob Dylan had said of the national calm during the remainder of the ’70s “wounds were healing.”  But a recent piece of American history would remain missing from my schooling.  Why?

During the ’60s and early ’70s, the war may have always been on TV, but it never captured my childhood attention.  As I grew into a teen, rediscovering The Beatles and watching retrospectives on the tumultuous ’60s especially the millions of young Americans who marched in protests which often turned violent for some reason, I found out the secret about Vietnam: It was our national disgrace, our collective painful humiliation, a wound still bleeding from the heart of America.  Perhaps Vietnam was like our  country’s heart attack, and afterwards we were forced to live more cautiously and carefully.

The ones with firsthand knowledge of the war were mute, too.  I doubt one Vietnam vet would have spoken to our American history class when I was in high school.  Many men who served in Vietnam were so proud when returning home from the war, wearing their dress blues or greens, only to be verbally assaulted by thousands of angry protesters, their own generation.  “They sh— on us,” one vet told me when I was a reporter in the 1990s.  “What?!” I asked in disbelief.  “They threw bags of sh— on us when we arrived in San Francisco,” he said.

Sounds of silence

A couple of older cousins fought in Vietnam and returned somehow changed.  Quiet at large happy family Christmas gatherings.  Somber.  Aloof.  Aged.  One of my kin was shot up so badly, he had to be put back together with metal rods.  I felt so sorry for him and all the guys who had to go fight in Vietnam.  Their youth was taken away.

So timely was “The Vietnam War,” the lengthy PBS documentary.  A lot of questions were answered, mostly by the men who fought the war, on both sides.  The war was not so complicated.  It was simply that old adage: The road to hell is paved with good intentions.  In the beginning, Americans were honorably compelled to fight communism at all cost.  A few years later, however, the war became a one-way ticket for the working class and minorities while other young men with names like Bush, Cheney, Quail and Clinton never had to go to Vietnam.  It was the days of the draft.  At home many Americans were earning a living off of the war machine.  The soldiers, guys on average 19 years old, were not equipped to overwhelm the enemy; their M16 assault rifles were no match for the enemy’s AK-47s.  That fact alone led to countless deaths, injuries and permanent disabilities.

Then there’s the Vietnam vet who was deaf in one ear, married with a baby, in college and still drafted as a combat soldier.  He showed me an album of Vietnam snapshots, images that jolt the memory: one moment carefree, the other disconcerting.  He was a slender young man in black-framed glasses, rifle at the ready, walking a jungle trail, smiling at the camera like a small-town Texan.  Then he picked out one for me to see: a row of eight military boots, each containing a rifle.  “What’s this about?” I asked.  He took some time before responding, waiting to collect his thoughts or let emotion pass.  That’s how his platoon honored those killed the night before in an ambush.  It was a battlefield funeral of sorts.

The dead of night

Not to be too hard on my old high school American history teacher, he did tell us THE lesson of the Vietnam War: America cannot be the savior of the world.  The cynicism struck me cold.  It had been just a few years ago in elementary school when we were told our country was the greatest because we cared about other nations.  That’s why we were involved in world affairs, from fighting communism to helping the Third World through the Peace Corps: It’s the American way.

The lessons of Vietnam are sordid and sundry: Americans aren’t right all the time and weren’t right about communism; invaders cannot win the hearts of the invaded or know the terrain like natives; and all the money in the world cannot force cultural change.  Almost upon arrival, American soldiers were told to go back home by the Vietnamese themselves, the very people we were there to save from communism.  That’s what the vets said in the documentary.

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It was the fall of 2001.  I was covering a Support the Troops rally shortly after 9/11.  People were cheering a parade of American troops marching off to Afghanistan.  One of the supporters was a Vietnam vet.  I had mentioned the high school American history lesson about that war.  “It seems here we are, trying to save the world again,” trying to engage conversation, get another point of view, play devil’s advocate.  He offered no response, just looked at me with the knowing eyes of experience and explained a very small percent of the military actually go into combat.  He felt the U.S. was doing the right thing sending troops to Afghanistan.  This time America had been attacked, so it was totally different from Vietnam.  Truth be told, even since Vietnam, the U.S. had continually engaged in military battles from Central America to the Middle East—as if we never learned THE lesson anyway.

But there is another lesson from the Vietnam War for Americans, given all that had happened here and abroad, its status as a police action and undeclared war, the human loss, financial cost, and disillusionment.  People around this big old world are mostly tribal, and Americans are not.  That’s a colossal difference especially when it comes to war.  Maybe the Vietnam lesson is we can’t save the world from itself.  Maybe America should let it be, the concluding song of the Vietnam War documentary.  For those touched by that war and its everlasting memory, the better choice is Blackbird.

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Confederate statues under attack by twisted history

“I do declare the reason why Dallas is removing all its silly ol’ Civil War statues is because the mayor is a Yankee.”

Old times not forgotten

Angry protests can erupt when the ruling leaders do not have deep roots in the soil they now call home.  A Dallas media poll revealed the majority (70%) supported waiting to remove Confederate Civil War statues.  Then an African American news correspondent remarked those statues in public parks and spaces make him feel uncomfortable and he should stay away.  Whites would say hogwash; blacks would say amen, so different is the American experience among the races.

I’m not sure how the plight to remove every Civil War statue from the South became a big, loud deal, but here we are in 2017 with much bigger fish to fry.  The economy, public education, worldwide terrorism and possible nuclear war can take a back seat to the hottest protests in America.  What started this movement against Confederate Civil War statues, things no one black or white thought about or looked at for decades?

Maybe it has been the constant reenactments of Civil War battles.  Maybe it’s because former slaves were never given what was promised to each and every one, 40 acres and a mule, if history records accurately.  Maybe it’s because African Americans were treated like second-class citizens for a good century after the Civil War, even with the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 mandating everybody living in America is free and enslaved by no one.  Maybe it’s because of the brutal yet legal reign of the KKK in the early 20th century.  Maybe it’s because laws like Civil Rights in 1964 had to be passed; racial segregation had to be abolished; public schools had to be integrated; neighborhoods, employers, businesses had to be federally warned against discriminating based on race.  Maybe it’s because Martin Luther King Jr. Day is not a recognized and honored holiday across the nation city by city.  Maybe it’s because of the Black Lives Matter movement, sparked by on-camera deadly shootings of blacks by almost always white officers.  Maybe it’s because DNA has exonerated dozens of black men wrongfully imprisoned and undoubtedly means some were executed for crimes they did not commit.  Maybe it’s because the largest gang in America is made up of whites not blacks or Hispanics.  Maybe it’s because of the African American church massacre in South Carolina by a Confederate flag-waving self-proclaimed white racist.

That damn war

I didn’t know or remember my parents and I don’t see eye to eye on the Civil War’s outcome.  One day I brought up the movement to remove the Confederate flag still flown in some Southern states.  I compared it to Germany losing WWII.  The Nazi flags were removed, summarily illegal to display.  It was a punishment.  They had lost the war.  I implied the South lost the Civil War and the Confederate flag never should have been allowed to fly again.  “We did NOT lose that war,” my parents told me.  “We” I pondered my parents saying.  What a bond to the past yet somehow lost on my generation.  My parents were born into the Depression Era.  At the time “Gone With the Wind” showed on the silver screen in Atlanta, Georgia, and any black actors in the movie (and there were lots of them) were not allowed to attend the Hollywood gala opening.  Isn’t that incredible?  It is even more incredible that the lessons from America’s Civil War, still our most deadliest because all who died were Americans, are not agreed upon by historians and especially those of us from the South.

Southerners were taught no one won the Civil War; both sides lost.  Modern Northerners don’t think that way at all.  And the Civil War was not only and just about slavery but a whole list of other grievances against Northern aggression, we Texans were taught in school.  Here’s a non-slavery list of causes for the Civil War, according to Wikipedia: partisan politics, abolitionism, Southern nationalism, Northern nationalism, expansionism, economics and modernization.

In the 1860s during a political debate, Abraham Lincoln asked his challenger if he still supported slavery.  Lincoln held a mirror to society, which had included and begun with our nation’s very own forefathers like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, both slave owners.  Lincoln saw slavery as immoral.  Yet Southern commerce and culture were ingrained in racial segregation.  Really it was about cheap labor and the inability to see a people who hailed from Africa as human beings.

Incredulously, Lincoln considered sending former slaves back to Africa, anything to preserve the Union.  History—like mankind—is messy, violent, unjust, cruel, contradictory and often less than truthful.  More recently President Barack Obama, trying to come to some compromise about the growing controversy over Confederate hero statues, suggested displaying them in museums but still removing them from public places.

Slavery and racism is the story of America.  It’s our past, our present, and apparently our foreseeable future.  Education that includes a lot of world history may enlighten some to see slavery wasn’t created by America but throughout human history had been spoils of war and a fact of life when one nation took over another.  Maybe that revelation could ease tensions and alleviate the need to maintain anger about the past—our collective bloody, horrible, bigoted, prejudiced, shameful entwined history.  Where does my generation fit into all of this?  Well, we were the kids who went to school with and befriended others from different races and backgrounds.  It was the 1970s—and for a brief shining moment we were living The Dream.

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To live in Houston, go with the flow

There aren’t a lot of times in life when we have a chance to start over.  Divorce.  Death of a spouse.  Or the devastating hardship of losing a home to a disaster like fire, tornado or hurricane.  Such is the case for tens of thousands of Houstonians.

Texans living in and near Houston show courage in facing a brutally gargantuan storm but also in dealing with the aftermath and the necessary prompt clean up.  Those of us across the state, living nowhere near Houston, pray and contribute in any way we can.  But we all collectively share heavy hearts.  Imagine the total loss.  Perhaps many who lost everything in the hurricane can cut their losses and find another place to live and work, create a whole other life somewhere else … if they want.

Even Texas Governor Abbott speculated Houston cannot rebuild as it has time and again from past hurricanes.  In modern memory, Harvey is the Father of all Hurricanes.  Amidst the flood and fury, tornadoes touched down, too.  The ordeal was epic and, of course for many a Texan, biblical—that lingering thought in the back of the mind that God poured out His wrath for some reason.  No, we must try to remain rational about what happened.  Houston, like New Orleans, was built at sea level and is prone to flooding.  The wonderful warm Gulf Coast waters are susceptible to hurricanes every season.  It’s a way of life tens of millions along the Gulf Coast and Atlantic coastlines enjoy while others find such a life of occasionally boarding homes and leaving town to escape a possible hurricane foolish.  Yet for many, the smell of the ocean, the sound of the waves, the dewy humidity and mild temperature calls and beckons.  It is intoxicating, so give them all a break.

Houston’s population swelled up to two million people, twice the size of Dallas, in recent decades.  Houston is the center of state-of-the-art cancer research with probably the largest medical employment anywhere and with at least one of the nation’s top universities.  Unlike Dallas which was never supposed to be a major economic center in Texas, Houston was always our state’s main business artery, being a seaport.  It was located perfectly for international trade and commerce.  There are the highly intelligent who work at NASA, and then there’s Houston’s oil and gas industry with lots of good-paying jobs and/or lots of jobs.  Whatever the reason for living in Houston, there were even more for loving it.

Love and loss

President Trump and the First Lady were practically on the spot once the area was declared hurricane free.  They saw for themselves the devastation, no doubt smelled it, too.  And the President was prompt about opening the nation’s wallet to help the needy and destitute survivors of Hurricane Harvey, even generously contributing $1 million of his own money.  Houston will stand again, a bright light along the Gulf Coast.  A couple of days later, The First Couple returned to southeast Texas to help out.  Their sincerity and efforts were appreciated and appropriate.

Even a National Day of Prayer was set by the President to help heal spiritual wounds from such loss of property, business, jobs, food, money, even plans for the future.  Healing spiritually over such physical loss is very hard.  Any of us could put ourselves in the place of others who’ve lost everything.  But as is said about such situations, until it happens, we don’t really know how people are impacted emotionally.  As a reporter, I used to talk with families at the time of a loss from a fire or tornado and return a year or so later to find how things were going for them.  What I discovered was not only could those survivors chuckle and laugh about what had happened, even about how sorry they felt for themselves at the time, they all said the same thing, along the line of “I got better now than I had before.”  They were referring to new or renovated homes, TVs, furniture and clothes.  But they could have subconsciously meant their emotional and spiritual lives were somehow improved having survived the loss of everything.

Life has a way of healing our wounds, if we let it, if we really want to heal.  But healing does start from the soul, from the spirit—for it is the human spirit that endures every hardship.  Expressions like “Let go and let God” become a source of strength—because at times of total loss, we are not in control.  We are left to float by ourselves or so we assume.  Only when we are hit hard with loss can we see our own resilience and find how tough we really are, how humans survive anything often with restored humor.  God made us this way, installing a safety valve so to speak.  Houstonians know this better than the rest of us who do not spend our lives along the coast.  They see hard rain falling, palm trees blowing close to destruction.  Yet after the storm, they experience the calm, the rejuvenation, the eternal optimism and overwhelming joy from just being alive.

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The whole World warns America about hate speech

Where does the World get off telling us Americans to cool it with the hate speech?  Who does the World think they are?  Trying to alter our relatively young nation into the likes of China, Africa, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Korea, Russia?  I don’t think so!  Free speech is what makes this country great.  And it’s what makes us unique.  It means we Americans can say whatever we want (almost) whenever we want.  So take that, World!  We can say “I hate (fill in name/race here)” or “All those (fill in ethnic/religious group here) are idiots” and even “Down with the president”—and no one can cart us off to jail.  Let’s not forget this is not the case throughout most of the world.  Isn’t free speech the most fiendishly wonderful right a human being can ever have?  It cuts like a knife sometimes, but freedom-loving Americans wouldn’t have it any other way.  See, to make it in this country, pal, you gotta put up with a lot of talk.

Sigh.

After the violent and deadly Charlottesville rally between white racists and their self-proclaimed moral opponents, leaders of Planet Earth got together and put out a warning to America and Americans: Stop the hate speech.  No way!  We can say “I hate racists” or ask “Who would attend a White People Matter rally?” and my personal favorite “You all can go straight to hell.”  Being American means we can mouth off.  Just watch our movies and TV shows, since the ’30s.  But being an American means we have to put up with a lot of ideas out there that collectively and wholeheartedly we don’t believe nor support.  Yet we acknowledge the hateful among us have just as much right as the love crowd to say their piece.

Problem is … hate is like a communicable disease.  It spreads from mouth to ear and infects the mind.  It has spread like wildfire over the internet worldwide.  You know, love speech can infect humans, too, even turn wretched lives into beautiful productive people.  But these days, hostility is on the rise in America with huge numbers of people that just aren’t happy looking for a dissimilar yet smaller group of humanity to blame—such as blacks, Jews, Muslims, Mexicans to name but a few pulled from the very old dusty list of America’s yesteryear.  And, by the way, lovers don’t make good, loud, obnoxious fighters.  They’re busy taking care of their own personal family unit of two or more.  Niceness doesn’t make good news copy or video images either.  So nowadays, opposing sides lash out.  It’s all the rage.  Peace remains elusive, and diplomacy has left the building, nationally speaking.  The very word, the very idea, has been kicked to the curb … for the time being.

The whole world is watching

The World knows better than Americans how words can kill.  We’d like to think words don’t hurt.  We might even agree guns kill but not speech.  We were raised on the smarty-pants ditty: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”  The mature among us, however, know very well how malicious words—repeated in vicious tones by a crowd (in or outside the mind) on the street, from the internet, around schools or in the home—can and do kill, sometimes the very cause of a self-inflicted death among the very young.

History records how words can and do kill every time.  It seems with every generation, one lone charismatic big mouth grabs power and before the World can stop him, it’s all-out war.  Been a long time since Hitler did just that, leaving Europe decimated and millions of people dead, lives ruined, and survivors left to carry on as if nothing ever happened.  The generation that lived through it is practically gone from the planet.

The reason why the World is getting all up in our business these days is not only because of worldwide terrorism ignited by hate speech in places of worship but also because of what happened relatively recently in, say, Rwanda.  During the 1990s, the Hutu, an ethnic majority, went on a hostile bloody murder spree to rid their country of a minority called the Tutsi, leaving close to a million dead.  All that upheaval started when hate speech was broadcast daily on radio.  A man with the fervor of an evangelical preacher can allure ears and minds, especially impoverished and uneducated minds, minds that don’t check facts or consider all sides of every issue, minds in a society that does not cultivate empathy.  In no time, the little country was at war as the Hutu used hatchets to slash and kill: genocide over mere words and deep-seated hate, animosity and jealousy among the majority toward a minority.  Add free guns (another American right), a large number of sociopaths (look it up, America leads the world) and other unchecked mental illnesses with violent tendencies, and the World can clearly foresee how our nation is becoming a boiling pot unwilling to melt and blend—like we used to sing about with pride back in our school days, like we figured out how to get along and live in peace, like we had learned the lesson “Live and let live,” like we could lead the World.  And we did.

The World, bless its heart, must mean well telling us Americans what to do when it comes to our government-sanctioned free speech rights at rallies.  The World’s a-worryin’ ’bout us Americans, not unlike an adult sister fears the danger her wild younger sibling might get into if not more careful—always nagging us to think before we speak.  Perhaps America is like a surly adolescent who just won’t listen, too cocky and brash to believe the elders who say our country could erupt in civil war again.

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The great American witch hunts continue even today

Been thinking a lot lately about Early American history, specifically the Salem witch trials.  These dark thoughts, and feelings, are due to a recent trip to the Boston area.  I set out to tour nearby Salem, that beautiful small New England town … where such horrible murderous crimes against mostly women occurred back in 1692—long before the United States of America was declared a new nation on earth.

From what is learned at the Salem Witch Museum, the town’s witch hunt started when a couple of adolescent girls, preacher’s daughters, swore their African slave was a witch.  The female slave, only a few years older than a teen herself, had been telling the girls scary folk tales from her Caribbean culture.  The Puritan girls were already living in a territory of Natives whom they naturally feared and considered strange in color, dress, language, music and religion.  And the Puritans believed in literal and strict adherence to Bible teachings, and anyone who did not was condemned to eternal hell fire.  Many a lengthy Sunday sermon warned of evil forces cast by the devil himself, always out to trick humans in order to damn their souls forever and ever and ever.

Besides the slave’s peculiar tales from the dark side, she was known to make herbal concoctions to cure ailments and reduce pain and suffering.  The year 1692 was on the cusp of The Enlightenment, already catching on in progressive Europe.  But in many ways Early American life remained entrenched in the Middle Ages.  In the New World, many of our colonizing forefathers were an Anglo clan skeptical of new discoveries and philosophical thought that would deem clinging to the Old World ridiculous and ignorant.  Nobody wants to be called ignorant.

Hang ’em high

So in 1692 Salem, the black slave girl suddenly found herself jailed and presented in trial where the preacher’s daughters and other adolescent girls in the community accused her of witchcraft: this by displaying before a jury—and in the presence of the alleged witch—convulsions, fits, contortions, hives, even speaking in tongues.  The slave was judged guilty of being a witch, thereby creating a community menace, and was summarily hung.

But then there would be another woman and another and another and another who would be jailed, briefly tried and quickly found guilty of practicing witchcraft.  By the end of this peculiar period in American history, a good twenty innocent women and a couple of men were killed by the words, actions and hands of their own neighbors.  One condemned man was pressed to death.  A couple hundred Salem citizens as well as their children remained jailed indefinitely, again for the charge of witchcraft.

The Salem witch trials were halted only when a governing official from Boston found out what was going on.  He ordered the ‘witch’ trials to be judged by citizens who were not members of the preacher’s church and to stop hysterical teen testimony (which included their uncanny ability to see the evil spirit of an alleged witch).  The Enlightenment of rational human thought and reason finally shined bright upon New England’s shores and ended the witch hunt at least in that neck of the woods.

Today Salem is picturesque with a charming town square centered by a century-old bandstand, shaded by tall aged trees and encircled by a walking track and park benches.  The Salem Witch Museum is located right outside the square in a former Unitarian Church, built in spooky Gothic Revival style.  A walk through the town reveals Salem residents and shop owners have handled the town’s notorious past with humor, another American trait.  There are several New Age, Eastern religion, and ‘witchy’ shops along with psychic readers.  The town’s graveyard includes a preserved area for the condemned of 1692 marked by a jagged row of tombstones where visitors leave flowers.  Indeed this section of the cemetery is wonderfully fragrant—perhaps indicating the human spirit never dies.

The Museum includes a world history presentation about ‘witches’: from ancient pagan women, who learned the herbal folk trade and midwife duties from their mothers; to practitioners of Wicca, a religion that worships God through nature.  Our ancient ancestors were in tune with earthly elements, believing every ailment and disease could be cured by what grows here on earth, and they paid reverence to the ever-changing seasons—Halloween being the most important day of the cyclic year.

Scared senseless

The Salem witch trials are intriguing.  I mean, what kind of person would believe another person is a witch, working behind the scenes with the devil just to drag thousands of souls to hell?  And what adult today would believe a group of hysterical teens?  Isn’t this the stuff of scary fiction and movies like “Rosemary’s Baby?”  Or are we all silently screaming like Rosemary upon learning the truth of her devil baby: “No!  It can’t beeeee!” followed by whimpers of “Oh God!” only to be scolded by the satanical cult proclaiming God is dead.  Oooooo, eerie.  Straight from the Bible.  Must be true.

Still … the very thought jolts our collective psyche.  This is because our brain is emotional as well as intellectual.  Time and again, human history reveals us to be equally capable of great intellectual reasoning and empathy toward our fellow man as well knee-jerk irrational, cruel, harsh and fearful … usually before each and every one of us takes the time to think and breathe and rationalize a situation or accusation.

Even with the lessons of 1692 Salem, America continues conducting ‘witch hunts.’  In modern history there was the 1950s communist ‘red menace’ scare.  At the time the U.S. Congress called movie stars, show business Jews, and intellectuals to appear before the dead-serious House Un-American Activities Committee.  HUAC ruined many lives—and never did find any communist plot to infiltrate Hollywood’s movie industry in order to destroy America.  This sorry episode in recent American history was ended by the one man called before HUAC who publicly refused to recognize its right to ask questions about his political beliefs or associations or to force him to name others who may have Leftist leanings.

This American hero was playwright Arthur Miller, who had written The Crucible to draw the obvious comparison between HUAC and the Salem witch trials—both episodes shameful and morally wrong.  The point was innocent lives were lost and ruined because of a collective and irrational fear, which still sweeps across America every now and then.  “They’re out to get us: the devil, the communists, the Martians, the hippies, the anti-war demonstrators, the Democrats, the atheists, the Illuminati, the illegal aliens, the Muslim terrorists”—always some huge evil force out to doom us all and destroy America.  It’s as if we have taken to heart every episode of The Twilight Zone.  Yet in time we would learn that communist countries were having financial problems, their Utopian ideals unable to support millions of people with basic necessities like food, medicine, and meaningful livelihoods.  Communism would be seen for what it is: a political philosophy that in reality does not work, because of man’s inclination toward greed, selfishness, and one-upmanship … as well as individual freedom.

I’ve lived through several American scares, real and/or imagined, against: homosexuality, abortion, the mentally ill, marijuana, satanic cults, and AIDS victims.  In Texas our latest tangent is public restrooms used by transgender students.  The line of bull is we should protect our little girls when they go potty.  Our state legislature is spending time and tax money on this issue, which is not a big deal to school officials.  Superintendents have tried to ensure the rare transgender student is the least of their plethora of problems—doesn’t even make the Top Ten.  Here is my own quickly devised Top Ten list of public school problems, if the Texas Legislature is so inclined to fix our societal messes: guns, drugs, gangs, violence, bullying, sexually transmitted diseases, teen pregnancies, poverty, racial tension, and emotional problems.  These are real problems, not tangents.  Yet for some reason, these issues don’t have that ‘certain something’ to ignite the righteous indignation of tens of millions of Americans.

So spare me another great American hysterical scare, always found within the gray moral sphere of human existence.  ‘Witch hunts’ always reveal the very worst in us; are always proven to have been the wrong thing to do; and leave us all scarred, guilt ridden and trying in some small way to make amends to the very people who were judged, scorned, humiliated, and intentionally misunderstood—without a second thought of their right to basic human dignity.  As for supernatural forces like the devil, well let’s try to remember now America is home of the brave.  The movies always depict us that way.

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Founding Fathers saw education key to democracy

Maybe it’s the writer in me or the reporter or an overwhelming passion to express my opinion on political and social matters, but I feel the Constitutional right of free speech is worth dying for.  So as we celebrate our American independence, I pay tribute to our Constitutional Framers: the extremely educated forefathers who showed future generations of Americans how to maintain a democracy in order to live and enjoy freedom … by first knowing how to think.

The Constitutional Framers were relatively wealthy which coincides with highly educated.  These were men who as young boys studied a classical education, specifically the subjects of philosophy, astronomy, the sciences, math, Latin and Greek, theology, and even music.  In so doing, they were to become men of diverse abilities.  They could work the land and make it fruitful while designing and constructing their own homes and buildings, some still standing today.  As practical as they were in their lives and livelihoods, they were innovators and inventors and most of all free thinkers, always curious about the past and the future.

Collectively they were most intrigued by the ancient civilizations of Greece and Rome, having thoroughly studied the languages as well as the history and downfall.  Government buildings in Washington, D.C., reflect roots in democratic rule such as ‘government for and by the people’ as opposed to a king, electing representatives instead of bowing to a family dynasty, freedom to ponder and express and debate issues instead of punishing dissenters, and placing no restriction on the most private matter of spiritual beliefs and religious practice.

And here we are today living in America 2017.  Each and every one of us should be ashamed.  A nation built on so much promise, in time granting all people equality and the right to vote, yet elected leaders both Republican and Democrat cannot even discuss in a civil tone matters of national importance, continue to play games just to suppress the other side, lie and cheat and manipulate for political party victories instead of the good of the country.  They have become assorted suits in love with hearing their own voices.  All this nonsense at the expense of the very people they were sent to Congress to represent.  And by represent I mean care for.  They have forgotten our American roots, struggles, empathy and ideals.  They, our modern American fathers sans stockings and wigs, have forgotten what it means to be American.

Washington 1776

When men signed their names on the Declaration of Independence, they committed the most courageous act of their lives.  They knew they were doomed if the Revolutionary War were lost.  These famous men set themselves up as known enemies and risked imprisonment, property loss, poverty and death.  Yet they were brave, willing to fight for freedom, to set up a new democratic nation.  They were probably unsure if the experiment in democracy called the United States of America would last even two hundred years.  Yet it has, even with a horrible civil war and times of an angry and divided populace.

The most ingenious political formation the Framers created was the separation of governing powers.  The three branches of government remain executive, legislative and judicial.  But today’s Americans have forgotten all about the wisdom to divide power.  Though we may forget about it, the U.S. president is not the most powerful person and in the end holds a position equal to Congress and the Supreme Court.  It’s called checks and balances to ensure the president in particular will never take total control of the country.

Being human, the Framers must have had dissenting views among themselves on how to form the new nation and government.  Yet they were gentlemen trained to listened to opposing views and suggestions and eventually would come together to sign and approve the same documents.  This is how government gets done.  Listen and counter, edit, scrap or rephrase.  They showed us the way.  But something has been lost in the last fifty or so years.  It must have something to do with our officials’ various educational backgrounds and religious upbringing coupled with the supersonic tech age.  Instead we have created a nation of intolerance, injustice, and most of all ignorance.

The Enlightenment               

One of the biggest arguments while writing the Constitution was whether or not the vote should be given solely to educated men, men who owned land, or to every man including the poor and uneducated.  The decision was to allow every man a vote.  But in so doing, the Founding Fathers designed our nation so every American child would be guaranteed a free education.  An educated population, well studied in various subjects and lifelong learners, was the key to maintaining a democracy.

Now we have a nation divided among the very issue of education: public schools notorious for harboring almost exclusively the poorest students and private schools supported by families who can afford it and believe wholeheartedly the separation is in the best interest of their own children.  Our nation’s schools, it turns out, were of crucial importance in the minds of the Founding Fathers.  We have let them down, allowing prejudice and ignorance to fester, along with mounting poverty and wealth.

In America educational opportunities are not equal at all and have created a nation of voters incapable of self governing.  The times have changed greatly from the days of our Founding Fathers—of legalized slavery and racial persecution and inequality.  But somehow Americans hold on dearly to a bygone mentality that makes no sense and holds no purpose in this age and time.  In other words, when it comes to racial inequality and human rights, we know better than our nation’s Founding Fathers.  Yet their intentions for the greater good of the nation cannot be ignored.  When it comes to the needs and rights and desires of every human being, their words ring true.

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Ode to 1967: both hip and square

The year 1967 was … magi-… no, color- … true but not quite capturing the spirit of the time … wild, not really … weird, a bit.  Looking back at that year through a 50-year-old music festival documentary, the summer of ’67 was whimsical.  The Beatles had just released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band—an album so profound and extraordinary, referred to in the annals of pop music as the band’s masterpiece—which was played full length repeatedly on radio all over the country.  Then they released All You Need is Love, and those words set the tone for the Summer of Love.  But a musical moment in California captured, presented and preserved the times as they were lived by those who would (as opposed to those who wouldn’t).  Monterrey International Pop Festival captures a moment in time: when music and culture united in peace, harmony and love.

The festival was one weekend in June near San Francisco.  The movie opens with a young girl gushing on camera about a ‘love in,’ expecting to experience the highest high with all the great bands performing on one stage.  Countering her naïve enthusiasm, a police chief expresses dire concern with the possibility of the ‘Hell’s Angels,’ then he corrects himself to say ‘the hippies,’ coming in droves to camp out in this idyllic community.  The logistics were dubious.  The town would run out of food in one day.  A lot could go wrong with a gathering of so many people—and by people he meant ‘freaks.’  Yet everything, as far as the camera lens shows, went beautifully.

It was a groovy summer for all those hippies wearing flowers in their hair out in San Francisco.  A lot of America’s young people were heading West for sun and fun and endless summer or so they envisioned.  Frisco is cold at night, no place to be walking around in bare feet.  Ah, but the Monterrey Festival was spread out on an endless green lawn.  The film by D.A. Pennebaker, featuring several songs by The Mamas and The Papas, is a perfect time capsule for everyone who missed the concert—and the dawn of a new era.

A heavy happening

The film records the throngs of hippies coming together to set up the festival.  Spotted on the sidelines are major performing artists like Janis Joplin, the girl singer for Big Brother & the Holding Company.  At the time American radio had not heard of her or her unique gravelly power-tooled Texas drawl.  She killed at Monterrey with a Big Mama Thornton blues song called Ball ‘n’ Chain.  The band matches Joplin’s vocal audacity with an electric guitar lead that pierces the ears and the heart.  During the performance, Pennebaker holds the camera on Mama Cass, sitting front row and obviously blown away by the new vocal talent.

Simon and Garfunkel perform songs from their hit movie of 1967, The Graduate.  Also performing were: Otis Redding, The Byrds, Jefferson Airplane, The Association, The Animals, Canned Heat, The Who, and The Jimi Hendrix Experience—another first-time performer before a huge live American audience.  While Hendrix concludes his version of Wild Thing—featuring a one-handed tribute to Sinatra’s Strangers in the Night—he lights his guitar on fire and throws it against the amps until it’s torn apart then tosses the pieces to the audience.  The camera catches some audience reaction of confusion and disgust with the antics … soon to be standard at hard rock concerts.

The multicultural performance comes from Ravi Shankar, the famous Indian sitar player who performs a morning raga.  As the strange twangs are heard mid morning, the camera pans slowly across the audience, all sitting attentive and well behaved in a sea of metal chairs.  Hey, is that Ann-Margret?  Look, it’s Jimi Hendrix seriously digging the sitar.  There’s Micky Dolenz!  Some in the audience meditate; some study the music, listening to every note of the performing ensemble classically featuring the drone of the tambura and the quick rhythmic accents from the tabla.  A few along the outskirts gyrate to the sexy Eastern beat.  One man stands alone in the congregation violently shaking his body as if casting out a demon.  Shankar looks his most virile, handsome, full of health and vitality, sitting on the stage with one leg crossed over his lap, his bare foot moving to the musical ebullience on which he is elaborating.  For twenty minutes, the energetic music builds slowly but surely, ending with a dizzying visual of Shankar’s incredible multi-strumming, impossible to the naked eye.  Yet there it is, captured on film.

Other showstoppers are Country Joe and Fish improvising on psychedelic rock, with a very young Peter Frampton playing his signature licks on guitar, and jazz fusionist Hugh Masekela performing a piece with a title translating to mean Healing Song.  Opening with African conga beats, the jazz begins as Masekela screams in what seems to be gibberish, shouting out to connect with Mother Africa or Mother God.  Who knows?  The complex percussion and congas beat fiercely while the brass clash loudly.  Then the music changes mood for serenity and calm, a young white guy in the audience smiles and nods, really digging it.

Mayberry USA

In contrast to the counterculture or the hippie movement, America was still very Squaresville.  This can be best determined by thumbing through the pages of many a high school yearbook, where guys’ hair is clean cut and above the ears and girls’ hairdos are bouffant and sprayed.  Think My Three Sons because that was America in 1967.  The pop festival makes it out like everyone was wearing long straight hair, little or no makeup, feathers, flowers, lace, granny glasses and thrift store clothes.  Long hair on guys was a sign of protest against the Vietnam War and the draft.

Another way to determine America at that time would be by turning the TV channel dial.  Number one was The Andy Griffith Show followed by The Lucy Show, both in or soon to be in color.  Color was a BIG development in TV.  The change to color film coincided with fashion combinations that a decade earlier would have turned stomachs: yellow and purple, red and orange, all colors swirled together.

Psychedelic was the word for the new fashions in swirled colors.  It also was a drug reference.  LSD—that drug that makes colors heard and sounds visible—was influential in the changing color schemes, tasteful or not.  The drug had been legal for decades and seriously used in psychotherapy especially among creative people.  Somehow it got into the public and was regularly consumed for recreation by a lot of youth in the late 1960s.  LSD wasn’t made an illegal narcotic until 1966.  But the genie was out of the bottle, so the effects were well known or going to be among America’s middle class.

Another way to fully understand 1967 would be to check the box office.  The number one movie was the violent Bonnie & Clyde.  Other top movies were not near as bloody yet reveal a growing unrest and dissatisfaction among young people with middle class mores and expectations: The Graduate, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Cool Hand Luke, In the Heat of the Night.  This in combination with the number one pop music hit of 1967, To Sir With Love, cast a calm if not ordinary perspective on the times.  But another huge hit was the dark mesmerizing Ode to Billie Joe.  Along with pop hits such as Windy, I’m a Believer, and Somethin’ Stupid, the year could be deemed as ‘suppressed contradictions’ to following generations.

Kind of a drag

The whole ’60s era in modern minds is 1967.  But it wasn’t.  In many respects, 1967 wasn’t 1967.  Within the national population, a small but multiplying number of young people, mostly residing in major cities and college educated, were hip to the times and willing to experiment with drugs, follow Eastern religion, and participate in alternative lifestyles like communes or living together unmarried.

The theme of the year came, naturally, from a very important song by The Beatles: All you need is love.  And for a time, a very brief time historically speaking, quite a few young Americans were able to love their way through life.  And in so doing, they experienced total bliss, were unencumbered by responsibilities and obligations, happy just to do their own thing of which music was the major focus.  Life should be total joy.  But soon the drugs wore off, adulthood sunk in, duty called.  American hippies grew up.  Most can count their blessings they evaded addiction, overdose, arrest and prison.

Monterrey Pop indicates its own carefree moment will be brief as the camera strolls through festival booths and spots a sick, lonely and conspicuously overdressed Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones—his fate ominous.  Modern audiences watch performers like Joplin, Hendrix and members of Canned Heat from the perspective of their fate: death by overdose, death at a young age, death from foolishness, totally accidental deaths.  Whimsy, then, is best lived for a day or two, a fond experience on which to reminisce, like watching Monterrey Pop.