Tuesday, January 13, 2009

My Vietnam Magic Carpet Ride

This is an extract that I pulled from a website that I had back in the mid '90s (how time flies). Not many people were into Chaos Theory back then which this article puts a social spin on, but I thought the message was still good today. The original website played a midi version of Steppenwolf's Magic Carpet Ride , but I added the youtube version below.



Chaos Theory says there is a sensitive dependence on initial conditions. In a dynamic (non-linear) system you can expect different outcomes over the same period of time, if you had different initial conditions.
My realities are rooted in the '60s. In this period of American culture we began to realize that there were more questions than answers. As television changed from black and white to color, so did our perceptions of reality. The "black and white" values and norms that had migrated from the agricultural society and pervaded the industrial age, began to take on different hues and tints.
Most of us young males got drafted into military service. Although a few evaded the draft, you could never be sure of any of our motives. Some of us blindly followed the leaders of our country - some relunctantly and some convincingly, while some of us evaded the draft - as shirkers, out of fear, or on higher moral principles. We were all wounded in the process. If you look closely, you can see the scars.
The scars of the '60s include 50,000 names on the Vietnam Memorial, they include a generation that we vowed to raise differently than we were (we weren't sure how to do this and it shows), and now grandchildren that have inherited more of our sins than our blessings.
We were and are a necessary catalyst in the human experience that introduced our species to the societal dimensions of Chaos Theory. For some aspects of this, I feel that I should apologize. It was mentally and emotionally easier to live in the "black and white" linear domain of the past where answers were absolute. However, I also beleive that the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end to the cold war, the increasing environmental awareness, and the World Wide Web that is creating more global awareness are also the result of the different inital conditions we created in the '60s.


 

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