On Valentine’s Day at WSU a strange coalition was effected and the Student-Faculty Council ended up sponsoring a “Bitch-In” on campus, which was an honorable attempt to move from the usual “left-hippy” practice of simply haranguing everyone, to pointing out the similarities of concern and interest among all students and young people generally and making those similarities known by attempting to gather the different people together to “bitch” at the University for all its weird practices. The general purpose of the Bitch-In failed to make itself known or felt, but one or two beautiful things happened which made the attempt really worthwhile.
Ron Frankenberger (“Anarchy” to his many friends) mounted the stage in Community Arts Auditorium in the middle of the program, taking his assigned turn, and (following Dr. Leary’s example of the night before in Ann Arbor) took the lotus position in the middle of the stage to urge the people there to love one another, love the university and all its people, and love life in all ways. As part of his appeal he read a poem sent him by Jerry Younkins from Jerry’s secret hideout somewhere in western America. Jerry’s composition was a love poem to “Louie,” Detroit’s favorite James Bond surrogate, and demonstrated the new American consciousness beautifully.
Near the end of the program my wife went to the speaker’s platform and gave expression to her own concerns. Her speech went something like this: “I have nothing to bitch about—I feel the world is more beautiful than it has ever been, and I just try to make my own life as lovely as possible. There is never anything wrong with the world as it is, so I really can’t have any complaints. I would only say to the people who do have bitches about the way the University is treating them, that they should DROP OUT of this place and live their own lives as free human beings …. And while I don’t have any bitches, there seem to be some people around here who do have very serious complaints about the way my friends and I live our lives.
There are some people who would stop us from trying to make ourselves more beautiful, even to the extent of arresting us and trying to put us in jail for a long time because they don’t like what we do with our lives. I understand that the director of the campus police force is in the audience, and I just wish he would come up on the stage here and tell us what his problems are. I know he must be very upset, because he has spent so much time worrying about us in the past. We only want to help him, and maybe if he’ll come up here and talk to us we can see what is wrong and try to make things better for him.”
Unfortunately Mr. Don Stevens refused to respond to this plea, and the majority of the people didn’t know what to think about Leni’s speech, but the sense of our lives she gave there was precise. I can’t improve on it at all. What I want to do is follow up on the statement she made, that students and other young people who are disgusted with the inhuman aspects of our society should DROP OUT of it and give their full time to making the world a more beautiful place with their every act.
We have been trying to tell people ever since the Artists’ Workshop was formed that we believe EVERY MAN IS AN ARTIST, that every single human act can be made an art, there is no reason to exclude anyone, and the only way this culture will be changed is through the communion of individual healthy creatures who will have no part of the general American madness. If all the sentient beings in the USA were to drop out of the mainstream culture and get together with their fellows OUTSIDE that society, the present American system would fall apart right at the center. I am more convinced of that now than ever before.
If all of us would stop spending our time and energies trying to save America from within and would instead unite in our own society to set an example for the rest of the country (our elders and generational peers), all the really stupid things that are going on would be effectively pointed out to the rest of the people, and the system would be exposed for what it is—an inhuman, dumb, insensitive lacklove machine.
The machine feeds on warm human flesh and works to make it cold. The machine is heavy metal junk and will not work. The machine is out of human control and must be abandoned, so it can rust away behind our backs as we hold hands and dance and sing and send huge love vibrations back into the universe that gives us life, the universe the machine has foolishly tried to make into something other than what it is. If all working artists—painters, poets, musicians, and other lovers—would drop out of the various art games and live their lives for real the game would disintegrate like an old Monopoly board.
If all serious students would drop out of the school systems the “modern educational process” would be exposed as a robot indoctrination factory, and the mice in the rat-race would ROAR in frustration and humiliation when they realized what was happening to them. As it is now, the game-machine keeps them happy by teaching them to ridicule their more serious brothers, that they can get their kicks by playing the game and going home with the door prize, which is just another useless television set but they don’t know that and tie their lives to it, grinning and pumping hands over cocktails at law school graduation picnics.
These people need our help, brothers and sisters, but they don’t know it yet and won’t let us talk to them. We can help them best by joining together in our own loving community and holding our lives up to them as examples of what REALITY can do for you. Yes. Think about that.