I always try to sell the Left on optimism because of the Left's
regrettable tendency to think everything's for the worst in the worst of all
possible worlds. We just saw East Timor celebrate independence. As I told a
celebration party put on by East Timor Action Network in Seattle, "Who would
have bet in 1976, that after ghastly suffering and tremendous heroism, East
Timor would, in 2002, be hoisting its flag?"
Let's remember triumphs as well as defeats. I like to remind the
younger crowd of some of the less-trumpeted legacies of the Sixties. Better
food. Better bread. The visionary radical hippies had a lot to do with that,
touting organic food and the grains that now find their way into the health
pages of the Sunday papers.
Good coffee was promoted by radicals like my friends and
neighbors, the Paffs, who began by roasting beans on their kitchen stove for
friends and neighbors and because the local town sold only Folgers. They now
run Humboldt's very successful Goldrush Coffee (call 707-629-3460 for mail
orders. Right now, Joe says the Dark Sumatra is terrific.)
Beer, too. The back lot brewers who began Sierra Nevada beer in
Chico, Calif., who ultimately beat back Budweiser's efforts to destroy them
and thus sealed the victory of the microbrews, came out of the Sixties'
alternative culture.
Bread, coffee and beer. It's up there with the old revolutionary
slogan of Peace, Land and Bread. When I got back home from a speaking trip
around the Pacific Northwest, I got this e-mail from Natalie, a woman who
was at a Spokane, Wash., event I'd spoken at on behalf of the Greens. She
told me that in an earlier incarnation she'd lived on a hippie commune in
Loleta, which is just south of Eureka and some 50 miles from where I live in
Humboldt county, northern California.
"Alexander (This is from the person you met in Spokane, Wash.,
who lived on the commune in Loleta, Calif.), I've been thinking about the
comments you made about the things that HAVE changed over the years -- you
mentioned that organic food has gotten bigger, coffee is better, beer is
better, that the Living Wage movement has gained momentum, etc. Your point
being that people have made a difference, and things have changed for the
better due to people having vision and holding fast.
"A few things struck me about your comments. One was (and this
relates to my Humboldt County years) that birth practices are another thing
that have changed incredibly over the past 20 years. When I lived in Eureka,
I attended the People's School of Medicine in Arcata, Calif., which was a
long-haired, long-skirted bunch of hippie girls (and a few guys) who were
learning to be lay midwives. We all had our babies at home and helped one
another deliver. It's so accepted now that men can be in the delivery room,
women can labor without being restrained, etc., that I think people forget
that these things were absolutely not the standard back then. You had to
deliver at home in order to avoid relinquishing power and being subjected to
established practices.
"On the other hand ... as much as these changes have been
important -- the better food, better birth -- it also strikes me that they
have been changes that affect, for the most part, those of us who have been
given the opportunities that lead to making a decent living. We are eating
better, exercising more, living more vital lives at older ages, but the poor
are more obese, eating more unhealthy, and suffering from debilitating and
sometimes fatal diseases at higher rates. We are having healthier babies and
enjoying more choice, but poor people and more uninformed people are having
more C-sections and unnecessary procedures. Not to mention those who are
still forced to relax with a can of Bud Lite and wake up to Folgers. I work
with homeless women and children, and I'm constantly reminded of how their
third-class status keeps them isolated from so many things that we take for
granted. Natalie."
Well, Natalie, you have a point, but lifestyles and preferences
trickle sideways and down, and you can't order people at gunpoint not to eat
crap. Working people order Sierra Nevada, drive through the Paffs' espresso
stands, look for good food. C-sections aren't always a bad thing, either.
Joe Paff tells me that when he grew up in the late Thirties in
a steel town on the edge of Pittsburgh, "as long as my father was unemployed
and we were dirt poor, we ate very well. My father made his own beer. My
mother baked bread and canned her stewed tomatoes, and my brothers brought
home rabbit, pheasant and other game. As soon as my brothers and my father
got jobs in the booming steel mills, we were now well off. My father had a
new car. We ate Wonder Bread, store-canned tomatoes, and my father drank
Iron City Beer. Moral: The victory of these debauched foods was the product
of American prosperity and TV advertising that made my mother and father
think that's what they ought to eat to emulate the middle class they saw on
TV shows. My mother finally denied having actually baked bread."
Alexander Cockburn is coeditor with Jeffrey St Clair of the
muckraking
newsletter CounterPunch. To find out more about Alexander Cockburn and read
features by other columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate
Web page at
www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2002 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
