Trinity College School - Record Yearbook (Port Hope, Ontario Canada)

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THE NEW NON-UNDERGROUND The glorious new American sub-culture, which had its birth at Haight-Ashbury and baptism at Woodstock, is grind- ing to a halt. The youth culture is now a myth, generated by the straight media, the Time Life Look hierarchy. To say it died with Hendrix and Joplin is a falsehood; to say it died with the Beatles breakup is closer to fact but still a lie. They were casualties rather than causes. The new sub-culture was a movement which has now stagnated. It was a youth minority’s freedom, music and life style. It was something spontaneous, fresh and unique . But primarily it was underground and different, like the Step- penwolf s Magic Theatre — not for everybody. 18

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The hippies, that marvelous clique of protoplasmic scum, who find everthing wrong with our society but can offer no feasible solutions for the problems, are the people who riot and destroy so that they can be noticed and so voice their slimy opinions. These are the people who preach “free love when what they real- ly mean to say is “free sex’ . Pornography, indecent films, and underground nude books only act as catalysts towards the loss of our sense of morals and values. All these things influence the upcoming generation and their sense of values. These hippies are the idols of the younger generation because of their supposed freeness and individuality. How could our laws become so lenient as to permit sexual inter- course on stage and screen for all the world to see? What has happened to the good old conservativeness of dress, action and speech. Face the facts, we are filthy ani- mals and we are getting filthier every day. One does not have to be sadistic or filthy to enjoy life today; or does one? Do we want to sit back in later years and see the world in the hands of hippie influenced or hippie type people, people with- out a sound sense of values? How could a place like Canada, beautiful, prosperous Canada, sit back and permit tons of un-sellable wheat rot whilst millions die of hunger in the far east? And we ask ourselves, in amazement, how could pollution get as far as it has today? The reason should be obvious. A can here, a can there, a cigarette butt over there and a candy wrapper here all adds up or rather breaks down, if you prefer, to a lack of a proper sense of values. If we cared enough, if we had checked ourselves when these impulses first began, we would be far better off today. As it is however, one does not have to look too far to see the “happy result of our negligence and lack of, yes, even self respect. I say self respect because anyone who respected himself and his family would not live in a filthy house in a low class district. He would want the best house and location his money could get! What about living in a filthy, slumlike and overpopulated world. What happens when we have all completely lost our sense of values? The simple enjoyments of life have no impact anymore. The desire for more outrageously expensive and ridiculous pastimes increases. We devise sadistic methods of enjoy- ment. Do you want your children to be part of this picture? Do you want your children to be like the “fantastic hippies”, those sickly, perverted, drop-out bums of our society today? It could happen and soon too, possibly in less time than one would like to think of. Our sense of values and morals is going down the gutter fast. We must check ourselves and return them to a decent civilized standard. We all, at least all the decent people left, know what a proper sense of values is, we cannot go on living in guilt. Something must be done and there is only one thing that can be done, so let’s do it. It is not too late but we must start now for a stitch in time saves not nine but a million in our day and age and we already have millions of stitches to make if we are once again to enjoy a world fit for human beings to live in. — d. a. gatcliffe 17

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Ralph Gleason suggests that “the Establishment has ripped off the people’s culture and is selling it back to them. This is probably the key to the problem. Seats at “Woodstock ”, the movie, sell for $3.50. Records list price at six or seven dollars. Johnny Winter is under a $600,000 con- tract with Columbia Records. Commercialism has bought out the sub-culture and packaged it for a resale. It can no longer be a sub-culture when it is accepted by everyone (es- pecially those who have financial motives). Somewhere between “Mv Generation (“Why don’t you all f-f-fade away? ) and Altamont the wheels stopped turn- ing. The Merry Pranksters broke up, with Ken Kesey re- treating to Oregon. Timothy Leary was busted and Brian Jones died. It was not sudden, but a slow breakdown of a movement that never reached its peak. Here we must clarify the difference between the sub-cul- ture and the “revolution ’’. The revolutionaries want to de- stroy; their thought is illogical and they favour anarchism. The backers of the sub-culture wished to create a new cul- ture that could co-exist with the straight culture. It consisted of rock concerts at the Fillmores, “Be Ins at Golden Gate Park, wearing “freak clothes, and living on a shoestring budget. The basic point here is that it was underground, something special. Now drugs have tightened their grip on suburbia, rock festivals charge astronomical prices, and the textile industry is making a fortune from former “freak styles. Long hair is almost an accepted convention now. Abbie Hoffman said in 1968 that “long hair is my black skin”, a sign of rebellion. If he said that today he’d be laughed at. It is not wrong that the sub-culture is being accepted by the straight world. It has its merits that need to be accepted. But this acceptance is leading to a synthetic culture, one of nine-year-olds wearing flair pants and flashing a peace symbol. It has lost its vibrancy. Its founders, for example Kesey, have fled, trying not to be caught up in the plastic. Where it was once beautiful, it is now phony and commer- cialized. The problem is the absence of a movement to re- place it. The old movement has splintered, leaving a vast void in the underground. There is no true sub-culture any- more, just a TV generation with paisley flairs and their Life reports of Woodstock under thei r arms. i s pearson 19