The Greening of America

Nearly 40 years ago, in 1971, there were two books that consumed much of my summer reading. Hardcover printings that had been at the top of The NY Times Bestseller List from winter to spring became paperbacks and, perhaps by mere chance, helped prepare me for the segue from rural, farm life to urban, city living.

Two years out of high school, while living at home and working as an electronics engineer at a radio station with the simplistic job of logging several meter-readings at frequent intervals and performing general maintenance, there was plenty of time to concentrate on the immediate future as the move from Michigan to Florida was destined to occur in October.

Charles A. Reich, Professor at Yale Law School, authored The Greening of America with chapters of progressive intuition on how The Corporate State would transform society into one that puts corporate successes as the perceived champion of family values and the executor of social, if not moral, prejudices. All in the name of The Company.

Reich presented the concept of levels of Consciousness I, II and III: an eagerness to comply with new traditions; materialism that originates from the manipulative greed of corporations; the populous that would come to reject decades of false promises and return to the roots of individuality and self-destiny.

Reich defined the influences that corporations would have on how workers “spend” their leisure time and instill in them the conviction that over a lifetime of employment, the accumulation of personal wealth would allow them to maintain purchasing power through years of retirement – a perpetual spending spree.

Baby boomers were the first casualties of lost identity, where the fondness of ‘a patron’ became the detachment of being price-tagged as ‘the consumer’. Yet Reich was enthralled with the counterculture revolution and repeatedly expressed his belief that the youth generation of the 60s would transform America into a socialistic communal society dressed in beads, tie-die shirts, blue jeans and sandals. At times the book became rather tedious, a fanciful idea considering the overindulgence of music and drugs, and primal sex.

Timothy Leary, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, et al, were heroes to the flower children and, in the summer of ’69, Woodstock became the monumental tribute to the excesses of the first generation to reap the benefits of economic growth of post-WWII America.

With all the hippie proclamations of living as one with nature, Yasgur’s 600-acre dairy farm was nearly demolished by an estimated 500,000 people during the 3-day music extravaganza. A year later, Max Yagur was awarded a $50,000 settlement for property destruction – $300,000 in 2009 dollars.

The primary green in the minds of the flower children were marijuana buds and the sought-after bi-products of poppy plants. I never bought into the idea that flower power was about peace, love and brotherhood.

If anything, Woodstock marked the beginning of the end of this ideology. Students returned to college, dwelled on what changes they might make for whatever new world order they could conjure, then quickly abandoned their philosophies to join the Corporate State of riding the upward tailwinds of success. Quite so, the greening of their pocketbooks.

Over these past decades there has been a progressive deterioration of the environment. America remains the largest contributor to global warming. Industry has polluted lakes and rivers with toxic runoffs of chemically enriched fertilizers that strip the earth of natural minerals and create health hazards to all living things. Overuse of pesticides may be a cause of the loss of billions of honeybees by attacking their immune systems.

Baby Boomers have also compromised their environmental concerns by endangering ecosystems as they’ve played the part of the Company Man and willed the expansion of urban sprawl.

With all the huff-huff about anti-establishmentariansism, most melded into society as if from a pre-subscribed yet post-dated prescription to materialism, as preordained by The Corporate State.

Of course, most of us Boomers were simply living our lives as presented to us by the more ambitious and presumably more intelligent. As it turned out, we became a lost generation as exemplified, also in 1971, by rock group Ten Years After:
“I’d love to change the world, but I don’t know what to do. So I leave it up to you.”

As I headed south along I-75 in October 1971, it appeared I was destined to be among the consummate nonconformists, neither a part of The Corporate State nor “in” with the In Crowd. I knew not how my life would unfold but as time has proven, there was little doubt I would do it The Rae Way.

Oh, the other book from the summer of ’71? Later…