"Nothing Lasts!"

Fifty years on, and Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters remain largely unchanged. Though the people have aged, so too have newer people come seeking the same answers, wondering the same questions, and feeling the same need.

I was not, perhaps, a member of that fabled cross-country entourage that so famously went a-viking back in '64. I was not a member of the beat generation before them, from whom they took many of their social cues. I did not swing in the nightclubs when swing was new, and I do not remember prohibition. I cannot recall our civil war. I fail to recollect the gold rush, and I cannot for the life of me bring back the life of an early 19th century whaler. I have altogether no memory of our revolutionary war.

In fact though I am an American, I haven't really been hanging around this place for very long. And for all my soon-to-be twenty-nine years of life here, I have been a part of no radical movements, started no revolutions, and fought in no wars—save the one that matters the most: the war for compassion. With me on the ragged front lines are the warriors of peace, who cry out for honorary equality, for energetic acceptance of all beings, for the end of emotional exile, and for the beginning of a real and legitimate self-sovereignty. Our fight is for a world fashioned on the promise of love: a place of beauty, safety, and mystery, of single standards, not double ones. A world where honor is placed as a shining crown of laurel on the brow of all peoples, where innocence and ingenuity is rewarded, and diversity is celebrated. A world where religious, racial, and gender equality—the mutual respect of a human people for a human people—is the new normal, and feminism, "Black Lives Matter," and designated free-speech zones do not exist...simply because we have no need for them.

You might ask me what I've been smoking. Okay, fair enough. You might tell me that I'm really just talking out my ass and that all this fairytale bullshit is exactly that, and that I should just get with the program, swallow the blue pill, and get a job at Starbucks. You might remind me, even, that today the nation of Azerbaijan—a country of some ten million people—has made it illegal to show signs of religious belief or otherwise draw attention to religious practice in public. You might remind me that the Middle East has become a clusterfuck of epic proportions, that Russia and Turkey and NATO and Syria and China and Iran and all those ISIS fuckers don't care much about my fancy "love is all you need" crap. And you wouldn't be wrong, to remind me that things are not looking too good these days.

Ours is a world that does not celebrate or lift up human diversity; full of fear-based and debasing legislature; full of the horrors of violence and state-sanctioned killing; into which massive empty bucket, dripping a little love here and there would seeming to have no real effect. Looking through the eyes of the news media and Facebook, I can see why one might belieive so. But the whole secret is that these ideas, all-prevalent as they might be, are false. Moreover, they are directly opposed to the world for which we fight.

Ours, a world where real freedom abounds, where nations and their peoples, and religions and their various followers play nice with one another. Where the sounds and smells and foods, the music and garments and stories of cultures from every part of the planet harmonize together, each with their unique voice, and do not for an instant fear or revile one another.

Theirs, a world of hit squads and fascist majority rule, of for-profit wars of aggression—war and rumors of war—of endless fear, of the few over the many, of the obscenely rich squeezing the piss out of an impoverished and increasingly subordinate proletariat...

And though Kesey and his friends would surely decry our modern world of 2015, replete with all its vile hate and death and fear, I believe that they knew then what we would do well to remind ourselves today: that the world as we know it is not lost. Though it grow darker with each passing day, though the talking heads vomit their fear-porn in our faces from every screen, they have not won. And so, as we revisit that miraculous and pretty freakin' weird phenomenon that was The Merry Pranksters fifty years ago, we find a unique opportunity: to ourselves stand on the shoulders of some (admittedly freaky-ass) giants.

What is a flag? Does it describe a place? Its people? To the Pranksters who lofted their own standard, the consummate freak flag, it was truly a rallying point, peerless in its honesty. Their flag—their grand idea—centered around the acknowledgment of the world as it was, around the practice of marveling at one's own strangeness, and in doing so to then follow that thread far and wide. To decry the fallacies of our society and its odd people was the Prankster way. For, with all their psychedelics and weird instruments and shirtless (and often pantless) abandon, they sought to forge a new link between themselves and their fellows, to extend a hand to the comparatively barren establishment of the regular world and say, “hey, come with us.”

What did the pranksters do? Well for starters, they had fun. Sure they sought to shake up the gridlocked perceptions of modern life, to reboot the machine and in doing so highlight man's dependence on it, and this was a brave step. One, I would add, not without considerable risk. Kesey and his band were riffing, playing with the concepts of “normal,” and fucking with folks who might have needed it more than they knew. They followed a certain old tendency, a bohemian and at times rather Dionysian way where the golden rule held sway and anything that didn't outright kill you was probably worth the experience. Theirs was the inimitable sixties: a world filled with lots of drugs, lots of sex, lots of “let's see what's over here then I guess” and, for what it was, it fit. The Pranksters were in many ways the natural foil for the tidy world of Americana they found themselves in. So they rejected that boxy little society they were born into, yet even still remained proud of their heritage and their home, setting sail on an old dilapidated bus and waving the American flag. They followed their hearts, their immediate desires, and above all faced life's strange wonders with aplomb. They were crazy, sure, yes. But they followed the idea of “yes” doggedly, and in the process created something the world had never seen before. Something new.

Yes, there is newness out there, a delight that comes from embracing fully the improvisational quality of living. Yes, there is a passion, fueled by the desire for this newness—the explorer's mantra, the joy that leaks out from the little cracks in our routine, the feeling of something else—something more than this provincial life!—that many of us never quite reach, or do but rarely. And yes, these Merry Pranksters, in their way, attempted to teach us about this newness, and to show us how to live a life comparatively free from fear.

But they had never done this before: no one had, really. Willing but untempered, open but unquenched in the trials of life's unyielding reality, they effectively filled the gap between the beats and the hippies. And I, living now as a young man in my own kind of America, have seen a thousand thousand like them, disciples of the original crew, whose morality is questionable and whose loyalty lies ultimately with themselves, and only themselves.

“Never trust a Prankster,” was the saying. “Sooner or later, they're bound to lie to you, whether they really want to or not.”

Today's version of alternative hippie-bohemes is, essentially, no different from those of fifty years ago. They are seekers, dreamers, desirers, and rapscallions, who follow their desires equally doggedly, even desperately, longing to experience everything, to find for themselves all the joys and all the wildness of the world, and in so doing, find themselves, I guess, somewhere along the way.

But while the process, or at least the idea of it, carries with it a certain noble aspiration in the desire to know oneself, the practice itself often manifests as something else. It is the height of selfishness, this no-rules quest for the self, and of course that makes sense. The height of stupidity as well, in many cases, but there have been many words written on the impact and the motives behind counter-culture, and so I don't really need to go into much detail now. Just as the selfish man seeks to bring the external world to himself, to consume it and add it to himself, the unselfish man (or woman, or anything) does not, and in fact approaches life with quite another kind of energy.

When pleasure—be it physical, emotional, mental, whatever—is no longer the goal, when the richness of life can be enjoyed but not sought after, is when things really start to get interesting. I have known many people who want very, very badly that which they do not have. I have often been one of them; I remain one often enough, now. But when a desire to lose one's desire supersedes the old way of living one's life, then the next level for us can really begin. When compassion is our new standard, when we see that we are, at our core, a waveform thought-force of compassionate living, then—and really only then—do we see life through a higher lens. We are stripped of ourselves, of our cultural identity, our gender identity, and everything that defines who we have thought of as ourselves. And whatever is left, strange and strangely familiar as it is, is the real us.

So the challenge becomes to integrate the two parts into a new whole. Through Kesey's example, to begin to cut away the chains of fear and self-limitation we are taught from birth, via laughter, openness, and self-expression, but then not to stop there. For to mature the Prankster's merry brew, to age ourselves in the old oaken barrels of the Hero's Journey and come out not as our selves but as new selves, not-selves, to be precise, is the imperative of our generation.

I do not believe that the way that things are is indicative of the way that they must be. I cannot, in good conscience, tell you that I think things will not change; they must change. We ordinary men and women have been lied to, used, bribed with table scraps for the keys to the riches and the wonder of our souls, and I feel that many people are catching on to the plot. Many, many people, all across the world, are waking up to the fact that we hold the real power, that there are many, many more of us than there are of them. Sure, they'll try to silence us, to shut us down, to find any sick method of preventing our voice from being heard. Our power is our compassion, and it is just and right, and we wield it for ourselves and for those who have yet to come, for Kesey and his lot and for all the revolutions, failed or not, that have ever sought to overthrow an oppressive, limiting, and self-serving body calling the shots. The thing about oppressive regimes is that they need us; the obverse is not true. In fact, without the banksters and the corporate warhate, I think we're gonna do just fine for ourselves.

So if you're reading this, go out, find someone, say hi. Then give them something nice—jewelry, a nice pen, a gift card to Starbucks, whatever. Don't be snarky about it. Look into their eyes, tell them you felt like they should have it, tell them it was nice to see them today. Mean it, and then see what they do. Chances are they'll be touched. Chances are you'll witness something special. Chances are the secret person they hold inside themselves has just been accessed, has realized that it's safe to come out, and is maybe even a little excited about that. So go make someone's day, and then tell me that we're inherently evil or some shit like that. I mean seriously. To the cynics, I say: maybe you guys just forgot, but from where I'm standing this whole thing seems pretty simple. Fear breeds hate, love breeds love, and if you put them up against one another then the love will win out every time baby, because it feels WAY better to love and be loved than it does not to. And that is something I think we can all agree on. The way of compassion is always an option. I don't care who you are, what your situation is.

Because at the end of the day, as Kesey will tell you, you're either on the bus, or you ain't.

And if you ain't on the bus, then where the heck are you?