PZ takes on the popey guy

You remember how the popey guy commissioned a report that was guaranteed to say that pedophilia among priests came about because there were dirty hippies in the world?

Well, today PZ takes on the evil empire in this post about the awfulness of the report produced by John Jay College. Everything the popey guy touches is slimed. I doubt there will be a church left to pass on after the popey guy's finished with it. It's a fun read. G'wan, follow the link. You'll be glad you did.

I've got to get one of those high popey-guy hats

I would only wear it for special occasions, of course -- like sitting in the yard, working out at the gym, going to mass, the supermarket, etc. I wonder if my local haberdasher has one for sale. He must, right?

I hardly have the energy to write about the inane report issued by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice (gotta love that) yesterday -- the one that blamed priestly sexual abuse on the hippies. It basically said how could those nice, ethical priests be expected to maintain their moral standards when there were hippies in the world!? Impossible, they said. So the priests raped a lot of kids in direct response to the presence of hippies in the cultural zeitgeist. Makes tons of sense, huh? Those poor, sweet priests had no conscious knowledge of what their penises were up to. They knew nothing, do you hear me!?

Sorry, guys but that doesn't hold water for anyone other than the people who wrote the report and the Vatican that cheered it on. And let us note that this report is based on information supplied by the Vatican. As for the report's authors, I dare say some or all of them know exactly how bad the report is. They would have to be braindead to be unaware of this.

They didn't even look at the harboring of pedophiles by the church. That doesn't count, apparently. After all, why should the fact that the upper echelons of the clergy knew exactly what was happening and pushed a policy of hiding the offenses and transferring offending priests from parish to parish and country to country be taken into account? Doesn't matter at all, right? Therefore it's left out of the report -- never rears its head once, I'm told.

Nice work if you can get it, John Jay. You just caused your institution's reputation to sag horribly. I, for one, will never look at your college in the same way again. Say, did Bill Donohue of the Catholic League go to your school?

It's not about who has the most toys

Recently I caught up with friends from bygone days and was shocked when they immediately told me about their possessions. It's like they were saying, "this is my life." It isn't, you know.

What's important is how you feel. That's the story, not whether you managed to buy something expensive in your travels. Where did your life take you? After all the twists and turns, did you end up happy, sad, resentful, broken, undaunted? Are you proud of your life?

Much to my surprise, at 63 I'm the happiest guy in the world. That's the news I have for my old friends: "Hey, I ended up happy!"

As for money, I'm still a hippie about it. It seems foolish to me. I don't have any, don't want any, and have never spent one hour thinking about money in my whole life. I've never balanced my checkbook -- I just go by feel. I also don't want many things so I'm easy to please. I seem out of step with others on this topic but I'll never change. Money is boring.

Yesterday morning I saw a poll on CNN Money:

When will you become a millionaire? 

1. In five years
2. Ten years from now
3. In twenty years
4. Already am one
5. Never

They should have added another choice: "6. Don't care." We hippies have no respect for money, none at all. Isn't happiness and feeling good about your life vastly more important than money? Just saying.

Hippies and the search for peace and love

That header sounds so old-fashioned, doesn't it? But hippies are old-fashioned. Our time is over but wow, we had one hell of a good run in the 60s. I don't think people today (who weren't there for the 60s) can possibly understand what it felt like to be a part of that. It was so safe.

Everywhere you went, there would be hippies there to greet you. We were omnipresent and you could just about guarantee that anyone with long hair was a good person. You could trust these folks and know that they wouldn't do you wrong. If you needed a place to crash, there was no problem finding one, at least in big cities. We were legion. (I like to use that word, what with its scary connotations for the most deluded religious folks.) You never had to ask for anything because people would share whatever they had: clothes, dope, lovers -- you name it.

When my best friend, a straight guy, was drafted during the Vietnam War in about 1967, before he went off to basic training he made a point of calling me, a guy named Richard and another guy named John into a room with him and his new wife. I think they had been married for about three weeks at the time. His big announcement was that his wife should feel free to have sex with any of the men in this room while he was gone. (Big whoop for me, being gay and all.) We all smiled. It was sweet, as most things were in those days. It was a kind era filled with trust and idealism.

I was a hippie in Boston, New York and San Francisco mostly. I spent a few years in Boston and lived in SF for a few months on two different occasions. Mainly I freaked out in Manhattan, but that's a post for another day.

Mind you, life was also boring back then. Straight people, which meant square people, were so boring that you would fall asleep if they talked to you. Repression and efforts to control people were rampant and expected but we laughed at them, mostly because we were high but also because they really were jerks. But the great thing was that no matter what was going on, you could always go hang out with some hippies. You belonged, every day and all the time.

We went from apartment to apartment, listening to music, talking about cosmic consciousness, having sex and doing drugs. Mostly it was just marijuana but we would ensure that we regularly supplemented our drug regimen with acid. It was a great, great time. Sparkly-like.

Today, the thing that makes me sad is not that those days are over but that they weren't followed by anything even vaguely similar. Where before you could always find your people, now you found yourself alone. You had no movement, no shared commitment or values. You had only yourself. 

Luckily I'm gay (hooray!) so I got a reprieve after the 60s: the 70s! That was a tumultuous and exciting decade for gay people -- but that's a post for another day. I only bring it up here to say that the underground of the 60s was, for gay people, followed by the underground of the 70s. Once again, I could slip off into the night and meld with like-minded people. But even this haven was disrupted when AIDS ripped through the community and tore it apart.

There is no underground anymore, not for straight people, not for gay people and not for young people. It's gone and I hate that.