From revitalized center cities to much more freedom for minorities and women and gays and workers and kids and the disabled, to the spirit of innovation in which computers could be invented, to questioning authority, to a grand push on classless fairness, relevant education, freedom of speech and thought... It's almost too silly to comment on. Yes, hippies ended the Viet Nam war. Yes, unmarried couples can sleep together without shame. Yes, we now recognize global warming. The spirit of the '60s has been so creatively materialized into the nuts, bolts and viscera of our daily lives that all it takes to not see the fucking forest we live in is a prejudice against the '60s.

An either/or attitude assists not seeing. What is there about pie-in-the-sky hippies that means there weren't imaginative grounded hippies? There were both fools and the real deal. Let me speculate that hippies will stand the test of time a whole lot better than George W. Bush. And the virulence George W. Bush brought down on us to squelch the '60s out of us is a vivid reactive illustration of just how real the '60s were.

The Beatles, for good reason, are the metaphor for the time. They got the job done. The '60s got the job done.

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We want presidents who can read handwriting on the wall. She has fewer votes, and more than enough of the votes are in. It's simple arithmetic. My anger is because Hillary's handwriting-on-the-wall simple-arithmetic aphasia is doing the spoiler thing - Her desire to win sabotages Democrats' winning. She is destroying us and can't help herself. How could she do this to us? to herself? Why shouldn't this anger any Democrat?

I would gladly vote for a woman who was the right one. Oh, Bella Abzug, please disinter.

Hillary supporters who read the handwriting on the wall - Please ask Hillary to drop out. Her savage persistence is killing us. Please help get a Democrat back in the White House.

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Where in this explanation are the FDR blue-collar Democrats who for years voted their pocketbooks, not their culture? who have slowly been slipping away from the Democratic party as Regan Democrats, voting their culture, not their pocketbooks as Republicans? the not-rich voting for their boss's party? We want them back.

I think we have gone through some stupefaction, however, at their willingness to switch away from traditional Democratic pro-worker values to vote against their own financial self-interest. Toss in a little Rush Limbaugh - their swallowing his crap and insulting us with it - and we have, unfortunately, sometimes begun insulting them in return. Our alliance with them has always depended on crossing class lines to nix the sociology the article lays out (as if voters are so other-directed that they know no better than to only vote their sociological group.)

We have a problem these days in our amateur sociologizing, in our classifying groups to make sense of this crazy old world, and then forgetting that these are never more than theories in progress, to always be scrapped in favor of the real human evidence we live among. I go to recovery meetings where sociological differences disappear. There are other places too. Sometimes one of these places is politics.

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Institute (more) rule of law and enforce it.

Legalize drugs (and institute drug treatment on demand.)

Make secret bank accounts illegal, globally.

Then see what else needs doing. They play good, what, is it called Whack-a-Mole?

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I'm a little worried about you, curse10, on page 2 of the posts, at 8:31 pm. You suffer from the same addictiveness that's getting the letter writer in trouble, but you don't see it. You're miserable; so miserable that you give the letter writer a blast of shit for not immediately doing the getting better for himself that is available to you. It could be better. It could be a lot better.

Take care.

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I suppose the theists could have turned up, but today for this interview it was the atheists. They sounded angry and unhappy. A little too much hair trigger.

I'm surprised Ken Wilber doesn't know better ways to talk to atheists. When he talks about God or godhead as terms for egoless oneness, he doesn't say that it doesn't have to be God. You don't have to think of the experience of oneness as having anything to do with God. Or you could. And God doesn't have to be a guy in the sky. It doesn't matter. It's still the same brain chemistry, and if you want to think we're just machines firing off our electrochemical neuronal activity, knock yourself out. If you want to think a guy in the sky's firing off your neurons, which I don't, knock yourself out.

For sure, most God believers haven't had a moment of egoless oneness and think of God as something quite different. But some have and do.

I'm in recovery and have known atheists who were going down the tubes with one addiction or another - even just with dysfunctionality - and sought and found the kind of interconnection that egoless oneness brings, which saved their asses. And they're still atheists. They weren't tricked into believing. I know creative atheists who've done similar activation of their neurochemistry, as did Einstein coming up with E=MC2. So I don't know why today's atheist posters aren't giving Ken Wilber a look. You don't have to do a drug to make the most of your neurochemistry. What some mean by God or higher power or spirit can be taken in an entirely secular way. See Chogyam Trungpa's "Shambala."

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(More, for free: google "Rabid Fanatic" +"Monty Johnston")