If you are old enough to remember hula hoops, or even the Brady
Bunch, then you remember flower children. We were the ones in the
tie-dye clothes with flowers in our hair who converged on San
Francisco for the Summer of Love and on Woodstock for the biggest
freebie in the history of show biz. Fillmore Auditorium posters
were free for the taking at the student union every Friday. We
protested the Vietnam war. We tuned in, turned on and dropped
out.
If you are old enough to remember hula hoops, or even the Brady Bunch, then you remember flower children. We were the ones in the tie-dye clothes with flowers in our hair who converged on San Francisco for the Summer of Love and on Woodstock for the biggest freebie in the history of show biz. Fillmore Auditorium posters were free for the taking at the student union every Friday. We protested the Vietnam war. We tuned in, turned on and dropped out.
We were young and idealistic and it seemed so obvious that everybody should make love, not war. Some of us put flowers down the barrels of National Guard rifles’ and a few of us – at Kent State, for example – got shot. Many of us went to Vietnam and got shot, or worse. For most of us, guns were distinctly not cool.
I was a so-so flower child. I tried turning on, but I was more interested in beer and my social life. I protested the war but I couldn’t really articulate the issues: I just knew that my classmates were being sent to a war I didn’t understand and that seemed hopeless. Bummer. If you had asked me, I would have agreed “make love not war” was the way to go. And guns were not cool.
It was the era of communes, so one year my first husband and I lived with a couple of fraternity brothers of his from school. One of them, back from Vietnam, used to stay up late cleaning his pistols and left his reloading-supplies catalogs around the house. He was and is the least violent of men – with a weird hobby.
When my brother got married, my family met the new in-laws in Pennsylvania for the wedding. Two big differences between the bride’s family and my own were that they could hang spoons from their noses and their dad was a hunter. The presence of hunting dogs, hunting clothes, hunting guns and hunting prints brought my mother’s anti-gun and anti-hunting prejudices raging to the surface, even while we consumed chicken at the rehearsal dinner and steak after the wedding. As a former flower child, I didn’t get into an argument about it, but concentrated on learning to balance a spoon on my nose.
Some time ago, there was a TV special about – I think – the African wild dog. Might’ve been the hyena. Anyway, a predator. It focused on the teamwork needed to run down and kill prey and ensure the survival of the pack. As I watched the predators advance on the herd of whatever – wildebeest? dik-dik? – the balance of nature’s systems was clear to me, and beautiful as never before: without predators to thin their number, especially of the weak and slow, the prey animals would overrun their territory and many more would sicken, starve and suffer a slow agonizing death.
I went from being somebody who didn’t really have an opinion about hunting to somebody who saw the point.
Of course, most hunting in modern societies takes place in artificial conditions. The prey are encouraged so their numbers are large enough to hunt, and then limits and seasons are imposed to protect them. In the process, hunters have become conscientious stewards of the natural world.
So last summer, there I was, the flower child, living in a tent in dusty south county, at the NRA hunter safety camp while my husband demonstrated the use of muzzle-loaders. The kids learn about caution, safety and survival in the woods, how to clean, load, aim and shoot weapons, and what happens after you successfully kill something (you have to skin it and gut it and “eeewwww” is not an acceptable response).
The boys and girls, pre-teens mostly, attend this camp for free – they apply by writing an essay funded by the San Benito County Friends of the NRA. I kept thinking it was sort of incongruous, me being the flower child and all, but it now that we all know more about the ugly underbelly of turning on, and dropping out isn’t even an option, these kids seemed pretty tuned in .
