Twenty five years ago in a brilliant piece of reporting (hey we won an award for it) we infiltrated the Rainbow Gathering as an Israeli tourist who spoke no English only Hebrew and very broken French.
We reasoned it would be highly unlikely that there would be any Hebrew speakers there, and likely there would be somebody who took French in high school or college and it would explain our awful accent.
We were right about a dearth of Hebrew speakers but only very lucky regarding finding someone who spoke French. Like the rest of Americans the Rainbows have an aversion to learning foreign languages.
Indeed that became our story.
For all their claims to a new age of thinking and universality, the Rainbows were overwhelmingly White Anglo Saxon Protestants from the middle or upper classes with really stupid names like Harmony, Peace and Fruit Basket.
Fruit basket was a naked guy who we met while he was riding a bicycle that had no seat up hill. Truly it was an incredible feat.
But no less incredible than what people will share when they think the guy at fire can’t understand a word they are saying.
But most of what they were sharing was pretty boring.
A couple may have chucked their house for a tent but they complained that the tent next door was nicer.
One may reject monogamy and join a group marriage but cheat on the group with someone (s) else down the trail, the group gets really mad, chucks your things and gets a divorce.
Apart from the truth that you can take the people out of the suburbs but you can’t take the suburbs out of the people we also learned that underwear was a really good idea. Granted this was less than 20 years after the hay day of the hippie movement but gravity is a cruel mistress that some appendages simply cannot defy for long.
Most of the hippies were part timers who after the gathering would return to their relatively normal lives and their relatively normal jobs.
They were just funny.
Then there were the those for whom abject poverty was a way of life soothed by drugs and alcohol.
They were just sad and they were going to die and soon.
They were kept in their own little corner of the camp and watched very closely by the Gathering security force because they stole things.
There really isn’t much to steal at a Gathering and somehow that made it all more pathetic.
What does it say about you if your net worth can is counted in cans of tuna?
If a new way of thinking ever emerges to change us all, it won’t come from the Rainbow Family.