One conflict I became aware of early in life was a clash between self-restraint and “cutting loose”. I disliked repression, but was also aware wildness had its limits. If one went too crazy one spoiled things for everyone else.
An example of this which may seem outrageous to some modern sensibilities involved “smoking in the boy’s room” back in 1969.
In 1969 Smoking hadn’t acquired the taboo it now has, and was far more socially acceptable, and the teachers had a smoking lounge in the high school, at the same time students could get detentions or even be expelled from school, for smoking.
This seemed unreasonable to the students, and we students grumbled and threatened a “strike”, claiming we had “rights”, and much to our amazement and joy the grown-ups backed down. A student’s smoking lounge with a vent-fan was put in at the end of the cafeteria, and one went there rather than to the boy’s room, if one was already addicted (as I was.) One did need a parental permission slip, but the lounge seemed a far better situation than sneaking smokes and having a lookout on watch, as if we smoking students were members of the French Underground and the smoking teachers were the Gestapo. Instead of criminals we were treated as if we were mature adults.
That smoking lounge lasted less than a year. By then I had graduated, and I was disgusted with the underclassmen who had blown the privilege we had worked so hard to gain, when I heard the news from afar. But of course I wanted to hear the details of the debacle.
It turned out that, if a student hadn’t done their homework, a way of avoiding the consequences was to set off the fire alarm just before that particular class was held, which forced the entire school to file outside into the parking lot. By the time the situation was deemed safe and people had filed back in, the dreaded class was over. And the best way to set off the fire alarm was to start a small fire in an ashtray in the smoking lounge. When these fires became too common the smoking lounge was closed.
This sort of situation occurred in other ways, involving other privileges, and it became obvious (to me at least) that along with privilege came the responsibility to self-govern. If you abused privilege you lost it. Freedom wasn’t free.
This creates a sort of tension between those who want to be free of rules, and those who want more rules.
As a person who had always greatly enjoyed the wild and free joy of minds “cutting loose” at a good party, I have also seen how people got careless and sloppy and let things get out of hand. When many parties may be occurring at the same time, for example at a beach, the fact alcohol lessens inhibition causes people to not give a flip about certain rules. People don’t clean up their trash, and if you pass a law saying they must, then they use other people’s trash receptacles illegally.
I clearly recall how parties tended to create a mess, and while the better revelers would clean up the mess in the cold light of dawn, the irresponsible cleared out and left the job for others. To make matters worse, the irresponsible did not take kindly to being told they were irresponsible, and responded rudely. For example, if they were short-cutting through a stranger’s backyard and trampled an old lady’s prize peonies, they’d hoot laughter and mock the woman if she came flying out her back door expressing anguish. If drunk enough, they’d pee on her roses.
Gradually I began to distinguish between two sorts who liked to “party hearty”. One sort was goodhearted, and the other sort had some sort of chip on their shoulder, and what they were “cutting loose” was more mean, more angry and destructive. I tended to seek out the goodhearted, and one thing I noticed was that, while the police tended to arrive at the goodhearted’s parties just as often as they arrived at the meaner sorts, the goodhearted welcomed the police, invited them in, agreed they had perhaps been noisier than they noticed and had unintentionally disturbed the neighbors, and nodded vigorously when the police suggested they be quieter. Then they actually did become quieter. There was no suggestion the police were “oppressive”, and the police were not called “pigs”. Such rude disrespect was left to the chip-on-their-shoulder partygoers.
I also became aware many parties I attended were not clearly differentiated by a distinct population of either goodhearted or mean-minded, but seemed a mix of either sort, including a fair number of people who could be swayed in either direction.
I confess. I could be swayed. But I protest I only could be swayed so far. The goodhearted tended to turn me off when they seemed prissy, and the mean-minded turned me off when they became… well… mean.
To a certain degree the mean-minded seemed to win in the end, if only because the goodhearted largely got their acts together and were too busy being constructive to waste time getting wasted. When they did gather to party-hearty they tended to become more selective about where they gathered and who they gathered with, to some degree coalescing into an elite, sometimes becoming revoltingly snobby in the process but not necessarily so; sometimes they met as a meeting of excellent minds. Sadly, I seldom traveled in those circles. I was left behind with those being swayed, and, with the goodhearted gone, I was also left with those attempting to sway us, who were largely irresponsible, and who, while sometimes as funny as Falstaff, tended to be bad influences.
I felt I could see a sort of rot setting in. The “Peace-Love-Understanding” parties of the 1960’s turned into the “Drugs-Sex-Greed” parties of the 1970’s, or that was my experience. The crushing, knock-out blow was the appearance of crack-cocaine and AIDS in the early 1980’s. There was nothing lighthearted about the direction things were moving in.
At some point things become so out of line someone needs to redraw the line. In New York the line-drawer was U.S. Attorney and Prosecutor, and then Mayor, Giuliani. He simply enforced the law. There was no smiling at “cutting-loose”. Even minor infractions, such as jumping over the payment-turnstiles in a subway, were met with frowning arrests. And the results were amazingly swift. Unsafe streets became safe again. Of course, this was no fun if you were one of the many who wound up in jail.
In any case, the cycle had moved first to permissiveness, and then away from it. Now, thirty years later, the pendulum has been batted back the other way, with the strangely garish mentality of ANTIFA and the “defund the police” movement. Safe places have become unsafe so swiftly that one is tempted to suspect the “freedom” offered to criminals is intended to create a backlash against those very same criminals, which will allow those in control to whip the pendulum back and create a new and very nasty sort of police.
I don’t want to get too sidetracked by the sheer stupidity of blaming the police for the criminal behavior of criminals. Instead I’d rather focus on a distinction no one seems inclined to make, but which I learned early on, due to my love of parties. I stated it earlier, and it is simply that freedom isn’t free.
Freedom is a privilege which can be lost, if you don’t do the work necessary to earn it. In terms a simpleton can comprehend, in order to enjoy a party there is work you must do beforehand to prepare, and must do afterwards to clean up. The party itself may be a time of glorious spontaneity and of freedom from restraint, but it occurs within the brackets of common sense.
Common sense creates a sort of law-book beyond the silly side-switching of politics. Politics can take yesterday’s crime and make it today’s righteousness. It’s confusing. Your crookedness is redefined as a nobleness which it is against the law to deprive another of.
To put this insane redefining most crudely, politics can change pissing on a little old lady’s roses from a crime to a right, and if the little old lady objects, where the police would once have support her, now a new police will arrest her for violating another’s rights.
But next week the politics may switch, and the unjailed criminal laughing at the little old lady may suddenly find the full brunt of a new and merciless gestapo clubbing his head, and shipping him off to a Gulag for “reeducation”. Nor is such a backlash reserved merely for the mean-minded thugs and drunks. If those who segregate themselves into elite gatherings of privilege become too disdainful of the poor, with too snobby a “let-them-eat-cake” attitude, they may suddenly meet mobs and find themselves on the steps of a guillotine. In conclusion, politics is fickle concerning right and wrong. But Truth is not fickle.
If we simply calm down and look at the law-book of common sense, it seems we should be able to arrive at rules which are best for those who like roses, and also for those who like to party.
Yesterday, as my wife and I took some time off from our “family” vacation to simply be a “couple”, we enjoyed the peace of a very nice place on Old Orchard Beach in Maine. The place was very well run, and there were no crazy and loud parties occurring. I looked around for signs of how this was achieved.
Even as I enjoyed the restorative peace and quiet the signs made possible, I felt pinpricks of guilt, for I attended many of the parties that made such signs necessary.
Not that such signs are all entirely necessary. Some may be the result of a visit from a needle-nosed insurance adjuster. For example, I never attended a party where a child was hurt more than a scraped knee or a bumped head, and I recall immediate action occurring the one time a child went head first into a hot tub. It makes me sad to think a child was ever harmed by a spa. (Actually I think children should stay home with a responsible babysitter if parents intend to go out and party hearty.) However insurance adjusters can see danger in situations where even grandmothers remain relaxed. But I can’t get off the hook by blaming adjusters.
I also think its sad you can’t make a new friend and invite them over to your place to sit by the pool and talk with you, yet with each and every one of the above signs I can remember a party, and sometimes ten parties, when jovial Falstaffs did dumb deeds and made messes that made such signs necessary. In fact that makes a good homework assignment for you to do: Look at each sign and picture the party that made the sign necessary.
In truth such signs are not necessary. I know they are not, for I can remember back over sixty years, and formerly they were not necessary. I walked the same beaches before they had signs.
Are they necessary now? I hope not. Why? Because common sense knows better, and also there is such a thing as being too law-abiding.
A young friend was telling me that, where he lives in Denmark, the people simply do not jaywalk. In the dead of night, with no sign of traffic, they will not walk across a street to a friend’s house, but instead will walk down to the corner, cross at the official crosswalk, and then walk back to their friend’s door. Such obedience to the law is admirable. However something in America is rebellious and disobedient. In the dead of night, with no sign of traffic, Americans just walk across the street.
Does this make us bad? I don’t think so. Why? Because there is a silly variability in man’s laws. Those same Danes who are so law-abiding, now, were law-breaking Vikings not so long ago. However common sense senses a higher Law. A Law that does not change like the fashion for hats. A Law with a capital “L”.
Which leads me to close with this question: When you are obedient, which law are you obeying?
Sunrise's Swansong 