Dispatch Number 49 -Over The Rainbow

This group has bled my interest dry. They were a lethal mix of personality: all-knowing and incurious. A collection of amateur artists, freaks, dopers, dreamy revolutionaries, drunk spiritualists, malcontents, gypsies, and hangers-on who presented themselves as fashionably reincarnated hippies with blind ties to that fabled past. One thing was obvious -they all needed to feel loved, to feel important and to impress others that they were special and unique when they were full of stale dead and unoriginal opinions.

My friend Stephanie and I tried to make it to the Rainbow Gathering, a month long festival near La Paz in Baja California, Mexico. These Rainbow Gatherings are the current form of the hippie commune lifestyle where most everything is permitted and money is not used in daily affairs, the intent is to get people back to their roots of community and away from capitalism. However, the charms and delights of the Baja peninsula kept us from making it to the gathering in the desert. Reflecting back I am glad we never arrived.

My chance to meet some Rainbow people came a short time later when I invited a group of them to ride with me from Baja to mainland Mexico. I was curious about them and heard positive things they propounded like consciousness towards mother earth and her people. I traveled with them for over a week and said my goodbyes as quickly as possible when we arrived in Sayulita a pacific coast fishing village turned tourist haven. There was an informal Rainbow Gathering at this beach town where I met more of the Tribe. Successfully catering to the tourist the beach front was filled with lounge chairs and umbrellas for rent occupied by people feeling comfortably rich among the colorfully poor. After several months of back-roading it in dusty Baja California accustomed to finding my own way I did not care for the ready made feel of Sayulita.

I shared late night beach fires with the Rainbow people curious to understand their outlook and enjoy their company, however, my curiosity was thwarted because of their copious consumption of alcohol and drugs. I discovered the modern hippie was deaf the way most drunks are and little different than the heavy drinkers at my old neighborhood bar that was full of artificially happy people with unhappy depressed lives that eventually let their anger fly after a few. Like bars, the cultural component that held these Rainbow people together were drugs and alcohol -finding them, talking about them, and taking them. They never complained about the price of beer or a bag of weed, but they would complain about the $4.50 camp fee while they ate your food.

Many had swollen faces and limbs from a steady diet of pills, pot, hash and alcohol; malnutrition and poor self-care were obvious. They looked as unhealthy as the resident drunk on his semi-permanent stool nursing a warm beer clutching a pack of cigarettes. With drugs there is a difference between self-expansion and self-deception.

Their behavioral promiscuity at the fire pit was shocking. With all the unity and consciousness messages the Rainbow Movement promoted I was unable to find it here. The unity was through drugs and getting smashed together. Common ground or intelligent debate was absent, and consciousness was curiously absent at the fire pit. The pit always felt like it was delicately perched between peace and war, a violent undercurrent was always underfoot. Over and over I would be told or hear others say, everything is O.K. and peace. Little of it could be found at night. They were angry. The mother earth chatter I heard during the day held no water at this hour.

Actions and words knew no relationship. They talked about revolution like bystanders hoping someone else would do it. One could see they were scared to death of the world and chose to cloak themselves in the safety of the tribe. I am down with their anti-establishment views and anti-corporate sentiments, but I am not crazy about them. They have a herd instinct and I noticed they talked about what they were told to yap about -repeated ideas. Over the years I have learned to cherish original thinkers.

Their life experiences seemed limited to psychedelic drug journeys mixed with lots of talk and little participation in life. The Rainbow Tribe was jammed with phonies, many of them unfeeling and false people. I think of the suit and tie lifestyle, the corporate lackeys pulling the 8-5 grind and the Rainbow Tribe people are against this and I am down with this too. From where I stand neither the lifestyles of the hippies or the 8-5ers looks appealing. I used to think the hippie was more alive than the stockbroker, now I am not so sure.

Maybe I am getting old. I left them in their tourist town excited about my next stop to meet up with new friend Carlos, a Mexican who owned a coffee plantation with 35,000 of the world's most beautiful plant (yes, I love coffee that much). Carlos invited me to learn how to harvest the red bean on the steep mountain slopes that lie northwest of Guadalajara. I spent several days with Carlos and his mother, Guadalupe who treated me as a son. They helped replenish my heart that had become so depleted while in the company of the Rainbow people.

In life I discovered that one group leaves you depressed and another group of people can bring you back. I love humanity and the magical ways in which it works. I accept the Rainbow people, I just do not want to be one of them.

David
Casco Viejo, Panama