A man is driving down the road, smoking marijuana, and is stopped by a police officer. The officer asks, “How fast were you going?”The man replies, “Gee officer, I don’t know, how fast was I speeding?”The officer says, “You were going 3 miles an hour.”

“…thanking my stars for having not chosen CU.”

**Wherein azlib raises his hand sheepishly and admits confesses that he is a CU graduate.**

We have always seen people gather and protest [The Current Thing]. Today, it is the “No Kings” people. Not too long ago, it was Black Lives Matter. Before that, Occupy Wall Street. Way back it was Save The Whales. Same people; different things.

Anyhoo, back in my days at CU, along that Highway 93, the Department of Energy ran a place called Rocky Flats, where they built the triggers for all of our nuclear weapons. As you might imagine, this drew the attention of the parents and grandparents of today’s “No Kings” knuckleheads, and they put on an annual protest at the place. They’d shout “No Nukes”.

I had a Navy ROTC buddy* at CU who saw the protests at Rocky Flats as a great opportunity for a little mischief. He joined the protest after having wrapped himself in aluminum foil and while wearing one of those RadioShack Fireman’s Helmets. This thing was obnoxiously loud, and I have a faint memory that there was a PA function to it, but maybe not. Today we would call this “trolling”, but that term didn’t come until we had the internet, which was decades in the future.

* My ROTC buddy was bipartisan in his trolling. In his Junior year, he pierced his left ear, which was then something that was done only in the gay community. But he wore a small Navy anchor as an earring, and the Navy tied itself in knots trying to decide how to deal with him. He wasn’t (to my knowledge) gay….he was just out for the troll. I sometimes wonder how he did in the Navy.

It sounds here like a bunch of old guys sitting on park benches or at the general store, telling tall tales about their boisterous youth. “Oh man, back in the day, we couldn’t just go to the dispensary. We had to know somebody who knew somebody who knew a guy, who had a stash of Maui Wowie. Or a lid. Or some shrooms, or peyote, or acid, or mescaline. That’s the way it was done back in those magic days.”

Those memories and those days die with you. The counter-culture, the drug culture, the promise and the freedom, the rebellion of youth. It was a baby boomer thing, never to be repeated. We had it all, had it better than anybody anywhere ever in the history of the world, and we rebelled against it. What the heck? Why was that?

Don’t you remember? In the Sixties, we thought by now we’d be living on the moon and have jetpacks and flying cars. We’d be living in clean future cities. It was right there, all we had to do was reach out and grab it. We reached, but we missed, and fell, and fell far. Who that comes after us will take inspiration from what we have done?

All those moments will be lost, in time, like tears in rain.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Stay in the arena. ‘T is not too late to seek a newer world. If I feel like stopping, I just have to remember Glennis’s warning.