Topic: Culture & Society

There’s been a big brouhaha recently regarding internet censorship and your local librarian. Remember now, the computers at your neighborhood public library are many people’s only way to connect with the web, including many school children who must rely on the web for research to be competitive in the classroom.

As Kurt Vonnegut pointed-out in Slaughterhouse Five, wars are fought by children, generally male, who are usually too young to understand the discrepancy of politics. Adolescent boys are seldom motivated by any clear cut ideology other than patriotism. For example, our fathers and grandfathers didn’t go off to invade Normandy or the Philippines because of any particular support of FDR’s New Deal, but to protect their country by fighting evil. They wanted to be like the heroes that our country had before produced. They wanted to make their fathers proud and to protect their mothers and siblings.

On the day that NATO began making air strikes on Kosovo I was at work, unable to follow the news on the radio or television. I was, however, able to keep up with the story’s developments by going to various news sites on the internet. On “abcnews.com” I found a link to the Yugoslavian home page.

In many ways, the demonstrations in Seattle to shut down the World Trade Organization conference were like something out of the sixties, with one big difference. In those days there was no Internet and we rarely heard news from inside the demonstrations, only the official police version. This time, though, there was plenty of online information from the demonstrators, offering us a view of what it was like to be in the center of the demonstration. Whether or not you support the actions of the demonstrators, the look is fascinating.

Now that we’ve entered the new millennium, we’ve become inundated with predictions of what the future holds in store for us. This is nothing new, of course. Some will remember that back in the 60s, a regular feature in the Sunday comics section of many daily newspapers was a strip called Our New Age, which gave us visions of a future spent commuting to work in private helicopters and dining on cheap and plentiful food harvested from the ocean floor. There were other predictions that seem more reasonable in retrospect, such as the notion that Americans would quit relying on trains and buses for long distance transportation since airline travel would become both convenient and affordable.

They called it "the Fat one, from Gilroy."

Gilroy, California that is, a little town on the northern edge of the Salinas Valley in John Steinbeck country. I don't know how it is these days, but in the late 70s and early 80s, when I was hanging out and making a fool of myself on the Monterey Peninsula, about the only thing that Gilroy had going for it was the dubious distinction of being “the garlic capitol of the world.” They even had an annual Garlic Festival, where the locals tried to attract tourist dollars by offering such delicacies as garlic flavored ice cream.

They say that you should be careful about meeting people on the Internet, that you never know what kind of person you're likely to meet in cyberspace. Well, I'm here to tell that's true. I know, from first hand experience, there's all sorts of people cruising around on the electronic super highway. People like Geneva Kachman, writer and publisher of The Traveling Menstrual Show, a book of poems that are all about...er, menstruation. But that was 1999’s project. By this time last year, she was busy getting a new holiday off the ground, Menstrual Monday, a holiday that celebrates the...well, I think you probably get the picture. Now it’s time for Menstrual Monday 2001.

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Back in 1969, when I was hanging-out on the corner of St. Marks Place and Second Avenue in the East Village of New York, I heard stories about a group called the Diggers that’d existed in the Haight in the early days of hippiedom. Even though the group had only ceased to exist a year earlier, already they had become a counter culture myth that was shrouded in mystery. They fed the street kids, engaged in street theater and invented the free store, which became a mainstay in hippie communities in the late 60s. Many believed that the whole movement of heads and freaks that grew on the streets of San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury district was a direct result of the actions taken by the mostly anonymous Diggers.

In 1969, Abbie Hoffman lived in a modest ground floor apartment on Sixth Street, just off Second Avenue, in New York’s East Village. This fact wasn’t hidden from anyone. The apartment opened onto the stoop and, in a slot below the buzzer button, there was a card where his name had been written with a ball point pen, presumably in his handwriting.

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Last December, writer Christine Hall published an article in a local newspaper about the astrological outlook for the year 2001. In light of the events of the last couple of weeks, some of her predictions have taken on an eerie aura – so we’re republishing the article here for your perusal...

In preparation for the new year, I dusted off my astrology books and took a look at what the stars might hold in store for us as we move into the first year of the new millennium. Try as I might, I can’t find many good omens for the upcoming year, making this a good time to remember the old adage: “That which doesn’t kill you will only serve to make you stronger.”