So, whose vision of the future did we end up with? Posted by Damp Cardigan on June 16, 2014 · Leave a Comment

I remember seeing them for the first time. They were dancing around each other, all ill fitting trousers and closed eyes, like nobody was watching and they were lost in some distant sort of hallucination. I didn’t even know clothes could be made from those colours. It was my first experience of a music festival, not one of the big commercial beasts but a more localised, seemingly rainbow powered thing set in the shadow of a mountain waterfall.

I entered that field clueless. I had very little knowledge of the counter culture as it was something that existed in the far corners of someone else’s imagination and here I was, all of a sudden, walking amongst its remnants like an interactive graveyard. I felt like I had wandered onto a movie set and was sure that at any moment a director would yell CUT and the fascia would be pulled back to reveal the devilish trickery at play. I waited for the people to break character, light up normal looking cigarettes and stop pretending that the sunlight burning my untreated skin meant anything more to them than it did me. But, they didn’t and it seemed like they were in touch with something that I wasn’t and without the right costume, would never achieve.

I sat amongst them and watched, confused with what was expected of me or even if anything was at all. I looked out of place and I knew it. I watched them share joints and overheard them imparting ideologies with one another. When I left I was unsure as to what I had been privy to and driving back through the modern world it felt like the end of a visit to a living wax museum celebrating a forgotten time, one that had no bearing on the world I lived in.

Age brought more knowledge and circumstance brought more time spent in the company of those who claimed to have been born in the wrong era. For what purpose this devotion to a tired ideal would serve is unknown. I couldn’t shake the feeling that they believed they were doing something important, like they were changing the world with songs and the constant immersion in the familiar. Treading the same path that those before them so spectacularly failed to reach any purpose on did not deter them. The journey is, and was, the destination.

There are facts here to consider. The much romanticised counter culture failed to change anything. The big-wigs, bastards, corporations and fascists won. Ask the pocket device that stores your data, feeding the hungry information beasts of the governments and it will tell you as much. Ask the service provider for said device, the one that now sponsors the music festival, if the hippies beat the corporations into submission. Ask your dreadlocks if they legalised cannabis. Protest hair can crop up in all sorts of weird places when the inclination to live a life of terrible contradiction takes hold.

Make no mistake we are not living in the future envisioned by those who collected themselves in fields so readily. I could have joined them. It’s much easier to fit in with them now as corporate computers can be used to order the right clothes for any sort of historical re-enactment. You have to look the part. Instead I feel failed by them and angrier still at the oppressive nature of the modern world and the ignorance of those who still feel that walking in the dimming shadow of catastrophe is the right thing to do.

Anything that becomes so susceptible to parody immediately loses the ability to scare the bastards that run our world. We’re living in their future. We have no other choice than to strap in and make it as difficult for them as possible. Stop pretending that it’s all peace and love and light and accept the fact that the twenty first century is terrifying. Go out kicking and screaming, rightfully maddened that no body of people speaks for you. Militant action need not be advocated but if any peace is to be made it must be with the bare fact that flower hats and barefoot guitar playing did nothing. Let’s give anger a go but if it doesn’t work leave it at that. I don’t want to see people in fifty years pretending to be angry cause they think it’s fucking cool. That would miss the point entirely.

Phil Watson