All you need is stuff

 

It is over 50 years since the Beatles sang All You Need Is Love and over 40 since around half a million gathered at Max Yasgur’s farm for a peaceful three day mu-sic festival called Woodstock. The children of the 60s thought they had a few answers to the world’s problems. It was all peace, love and under-standing and it’s hard to disagree with such sen-timents. It would seem though that these are easier to sing about than to actually practice. That the message was sometimes delivered through a haze of mind-altering substances, and the mes-sengers turned a buck out of it, does not nec-essarily detract from the message itself. But we failed to believe it and if the television news since is any indication we haven’t behaved like we thought it was even a particularly good idea.

The times, though, were a-changin’ and the answer blowin’ in the wind. The peace, love and understanding message did not gain popular acceptance. We instead preferred to believe in money and television, settle into comfortably numb suburban mediocrity and go quietly mad. From that point on, peace didn’t have much of a chance. The 70s saw the message degenerate into a wash of well-intentioned warm fuzzy sentimental twaddle that of-ten managed to pass for profundity at the time.

I remember once being given a poster by someone who may have mistaken something I did for a favour. It was popular in its day; it depicted two hands reaching up in a semi-religious fashion releasing a dove heavenward. ‘If you love something set it free’ it invoked. The second bit reckoned that if it came back you could have it for dinner or something. And if it didn’t? Well, you couldn’t. However, during a party some wag either unlucky in love, or too bored to dance, defaced it to read ‘If you love something set it free and it will crap on ya from a great height’. I enjoyed the amended version immensely and kept the poster for many years. It was a sign of a more cynical age.

By the mid 80s just about everyone had given up on all this peace, love and understanding stuff. Young people exchanged marijuana and peace marches for sensible haircuts and degrees in economics. The world was their oyster and they were happy to loan you a sack full at compound interest calculated quarterly, provided of course they were somebody else’s oysters. We sold out in the hope of getting ahead without realising that ‘getting ahead’ as an individual matters little when the whole world is sliding backwards at an even faster rate.

Now pop music is not produced by bearded long-haired hippies singing ‘all you need is love’. 

We have, as some are fond of saying, moved forward. The pop singers of today are criminal gangsters adorned with the tawdry tokens of wealth. Their message concentrates on such universally edifying concepts as ‘pimping yo bitch’ and ‘getting down with skanky ho’s’.

The degeneration in pop culture only mirrors changes in the wider world. Since the 60s many have made it their special business to pillage the planet and their neighbours of whatever they can get away with and then waste it. Ideas of prudence, of conservation, of ‘waste not, want not’ and ‘a penny saved is a penny earned’ are passé in today’s consumer-driven society. We are told that growth and change are good. We have been fooled into discarding the tried and true on the strength of vague promises from unreli-able people who tell us they know what’s best but who cannot produce a shred of evidence to support such claims.

We have been duped into consuming so much that there is very little remaining in the resources cupboard and nothing of note in the morality drawer. Stupefied by the pace of life we have watched needless and damaging change for changes sake and done little to stop it and nothing to reverse it. We have allowed venal and unscrupulous men to have their way and to our shame, emulated and encouraged their behaviour.

Along with the pursuit of peace, love and understanding, ideals of fairness, respect, honesty and integrity are no longer virtues in a crazy world. We may never have practised these vir-tues particularly well but at least we once agreed they were noble. Faith and hope too are now discredited commodi-ties. Not listed on the Dow Jones, their stock unvalued, the dividend they pay is currency no more. It cannot be used to buy stuff. The mantra has changed. Over half a century has passed and we have traded All You Ned Is Love for All You Need Is Stuff. And we are choking ourselves with it. „

prof_worzel@hotmail.com

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