The March Hare: Spring '03
Issue 36

Open Season for Visitors * Member Bio: Penn * Working on Sustainability * Ecovillage Search * Eco to Go: Time * Can You Help? * Nature Corner * The View from the Top of the Rabbit Hole

The View from the Top of the Rabbit-Hole
by John Ivens

What's a baby boomer to do?

I was born a month after they dropped nukes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In October 1962 we froze in terror at my high school after an air raid siren sounded. It was just a test: we practiced "duck and cover". In 1970, I flew right seat in an Air Force jet transport over Cambodia. Even though the cratered jungle landscape looked like the surface of the moon, the traffic on the Ho Chi Minh Trail flowed unabated. On my return flight back to the States I hauled a load of loaded silver caskets from Viet Nam. "Hello America, how are you. These are your native sons." As I write, I wonder when the bombs will begin falling on Baghdad again, and the carnage begins anew. Since Vietnam I've done a lot of peace activism--and right now it seems to no avail. Is there a more peaceful place down the rabbit-hole?

I'm a college professor by trade. I have twenty-five years of experience teaching psychology at three different schools. Aren't these schools supposed to help young adults learn how to participate in the life of the community? Shouldn't the campus be a model with an eye toward utopian community--striving for open expression of new ideas, struggling to build consensus, and working for a sustainable future? Instead, we prepare people to commute in SUVs from gated bedroom community enclaves to plush jobs in a vast, fossil-fuel polluted urban sprawl. We ask for secret ballots in faculty meetings because we are concerned that our vote might not be looked upon favorably by administrators and we might lose what's left of our budget or even our job. There are days in the classroom when the hard stares seem to say, "Get real! Why are you trying to get us interested in this stuff, when you put us under so much pressure to get a decent grade. Just tell us what's going to be on the test and don't you dare give us grades that will take away athletic eligibility or scholarships!" The view from the classroom is surely dystopia. Can a vision of utopia be found down the rabbit-hole?

And yet, would they take care of me when I get old and sick, down the rabbit-hole? Or, would they vote this contentious old pain-in-the-ass "off the island?" Would I turn my back on my retirement plans and face retirement in poverty? Would my companion come with me on the trip? What can I bring that sustains my life and helps me to transcend my suffering and foolishness on the trip down the rabbit hole?

But, maybe, I could find the time to write in peace and maybe even get stuff published. I could learn to grow more of what I eat in a garden. I could eat less and not so far up the food chain--maybe even lose a few pounds. I could make music everyday with friends--just for fun. I could work on healing the rift between my soul and nature. Maybe I could even have and give hope for the future of a beloved community, down the rabbit hole.

John Ivens lives in DeWitt, Iowa with his wife, El. John visited DR in August 2002, has taught psychology for 25 years, and plans a field trip to DR for his Ecological Psychology course early this summer.