reprints:{I'm probably about to lose a massive amount of my back pages here. somewhere in the archives between April 02 and December 02 is some bad code or something that's made those archives disappear and I can't get no help from the server side crew because I'm a freeloader I guess, anyway they're about to roll the whole mess over to a new server or something and I'm afraid I'll lose all that so this is something I remembered because of a Robert Stone interview robotwisdom linked to, so I thought this was in the Bermuda Archive Triangle but it wasn't but now it's here also}
Don Williams:
Yes, Kesey proselytized for drug use, and doubtlessly was a proximate cause of suffering. It must be said that many have suffered and died because of drug abuse. Never mind that many lives were changed for the better in the 1960s, and that an expansive new worldview took center stage that doubtlessly saved millions. Never mind that LSD was legal back then, and that it was the CIA who introduced the drugs to Kesey, or that it was the government's own faulty drug policy that gave rise to unregulated use and the resulting cocaine wars in our inner cities. It must be admitted that Kesey was part of the mix that popularized drugs.
{Kesey's response to somebody in the crowd jeering when he offered to accept someone's baby rather than it being aborted, this was at a poetry thing at I think Lewis and Clark, somewhere anyway in Portland sometime in '75. he said to the effect that it wasn't about the numbers. the human race wasn't a pile of digits that got too big, that it was about HOW we lived, that there was enough food right then for everybody living, which there was, that it wasn't about running out of food it was about running out of good people, which by getting everybody all excited about the numbers being too high we would encourage the THEMs to reduce the numbers which of course they would start with the gadflies, which of all these words, that one is accurate, he said 'gadflies', which was us pretty much, and wouldn't that be a fine thing to make sure that all the THEMs got enough to eat because there wasn't anymore us around to have to share it all with. and of course he wasn't a naif, or naive about it, but it's there the truth of it, the actual practicality of it, the truth is if you live right and I live right and we all do, the numbers will proceed to take care of themselves, it's not a henhouse, at least it wasn't then. these days are a little different.
the other thing I wanted to put in here, is that the good that was done by people with psychedelically-awakened minds is immeasurable, nobody can prove it and because of that it goes entirely unremarked upon though one glance at the young people of this day will show a measure of health and fitness that was freakishly rare in the mid 60's, just like telling kids now that the sides of the road were covered literally covered with trash in some areas and filthy with litter everywhere produces incredulity and depending on their respect for the teller pure disbelief, ditto smoking INSIDE stores. no way. yes way. cigarette butts on the linoleum in the grocery store. we did that, or undid it rather. and never took credit for it, because there was still too much work to do. we cleaned up and redirected the whole country's attitude about food, about health, the whole world's really, and for a while it looked like it might get the upper hand, that healthy way of looking at life. it shows in the faces of lots of kids today. and drugs were a part of what that was. why do we have to get mealy-mouthed about collateral damage every time we say that? do the car companies have to talk about traffic fatalities being the number one killer of children? of people under 30? do they? no Debbie it's not drunk drivers, it's cars and going everywhere in cars. the numbers are astronomically weighted there. so the heck with it. Kesey took drugs, advocated the psychedelic experience, and he was one of the finest men I've ever known. he was a good man, a genuinely decent honest man, and he was powerfully brave with that goodness. I've known tough guys who were gentle when things were calm, and when things got rough they got rough right back. Kesey took his gentleness into uncharted territory and fought with the darkest forces this world knows, and kept that gentleness alive. he was a man of peace and a mother wit. whether America wants to admit it or not, he was an American champion, in the fullest sense of that word.}
