Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
A young Jew in Hoosierville had faced tough questions from tough, inquisition-hearted
people:
What is a Jew? Why are you Jewish? Why does anybody need Jews? Why did you kill
Jesus?
Oh, yes, the little playmates at Hoosier Elementary had wanted to know, had wanted
to fight, had wanted blood revenge. Everybody knows now where this line of questioning is
headed, or they should know, if they're Chewish. The answers often began with
er . . . uh,
well, it's like this
. . . Maybe it was only imaginary that things changed when Bob Dylan cap-
tured the essence of Jewish history in a few lines of lyric. But concise, eloquent language down
at street level can change perspective and understanding. The Jews were the first culture/tra-
dition/belief system to codify behavior on human sacrifice; it was not cool or good. It was
bad—thirty-seven hundred sixty-one years before Jesus H. Christ it was bad. God delivered
the message by example to Abraham, who proved himself devout but would have been wrong.
Such is the beauty of Judaism, with its unique flexibility allowing the rules to be bent in times
of extreme circumstance. Rules? What? Rules. Sacrificial offering from that time onward was
deemed best made with a goat, a scapegoat who would carry the burden of our sins. The irony
of the beauty of Judaism is the practice of scapegoating Jews; they're so convenient.
These and other orbital perspectives drifted on out to Highway 61 where thoughts got
splayed like offspring on the sacrificial block to the deity of altered consciousness. Those days
and clouds and camels and new friends and family and Bob Dylan took us farther from sub-
urban influence than we'd been or imagined. We'd smoked too much dope, and many days of
it made for a paltry deposit in the memory banks. Yet we became vested on a heady accumu-
lation of feelings of well-being, of fulfillment in fun—and in the most important component
of those years, no matter how lost it now seems: the love all around us.
We lived with abandon in a spirit of accepting the whole wide world, celebrating its many-
faceted freedoms, its layered realities, its amazing quirks and beautiful blemishes, and yes, its
endless opportunities for goofing. As in all cultural phenomena, the clothing, nuance, body
language and behaviors of the time were a demonstration of who we were and what might
be—faith in these things felt natural. Many souls remember that faith, those wild times and
amazing scenes. We did not ponder the poor guys in the jungles trading fire that very mo-
ment. We did not resent them or dislike them in any way. We heard, like everybody else, that
we'd spit on them, as if spitting on the Viet veterans was aligned with our views and feelings.
It didn't sit right; so hostile and warlike in a crowd committed to peace.
Decades later we learned how freedom of speech is easily abused—nobody spit on home-
coming vets. The spitting story was a pioneer effort of warring interests to influence percep-
tion and mold collective consciousness into mob rule. Modern attempts of the technique in-
clude Kenya, socialism in the White House, death panels as part of health care and a range of
vitriol to remind us of our roots in the 60s, when we got grounded in truth.
