SWIMMING UPSTREAM

There are two questions that have nagged at me for years, and now, thanks to the blogosphere, I finally have my answers. My questions were:

• Where have all the hippies gone?
• Why would anyone want to home-school their kids?

As it turns out, the two questions are somewhat interrelated. I began seriously puzzling over the first dilemma around the time of the Enron debacle, and my disgust continued to grow as one company after another got toppled by greed and dishonesty. Many of the CEO's and CFO's of these companies were of my own generation - the Flower Power generation. So what on earth happened to all that wonderful 60's idealism? When we said we would change the world, this certainly wasn't what I was picturing!

The second question, about home-schooling, came up when we were living overseas. We had a friend - an extremely nice, intelligent lady - who had two young daughters, and a third on the way. We also had an excellent school on the compound, with really wonderful teachers. So why on earth would she want to be stuck at home playing teacher, when she could be playing bridge, tennis, golf, quilting, or hanging out at the pool? I finally realized that their beliefs leaned towards fundamental. Since they didn't do Santa Claus or Halloween and such, I figured they kept their kids out of school to avoid them being bombarded with all that year round, and pressured to join in, thus making their lives much simpler.

When I moved here to Wimberley, and started trying to live a simpler, greener, more satisfying life, I began to meet others in the area who were trying to do the same. Then I started discovering blogs written by even more, all on the same path. Many of these writers were parents of school-aged kids. Interesting tidbit: Know what one thing a majority of them had in common? Home-schooled children!

So, here's my theory about what happened to all the hippies: They sent their kids to public school. Then, said kids started coming home almost every day with a note saying "send money" for this or that. Even if they were tough enough to resist the pressure to buy the latest fashions for their kids, or to give them a shiny new car when they turned sixteen, it was much, much harder to resist the insidious fear that if you didn't pay for music lessons, or gymnastics, or special tutoring, or SAT prep classes, and on and on, they would never be able to hold their own against all the other kids, who had private lessons every day after school, sports every weekend, and special camps all summer long. Eventually, these formerly idealistic parents got so caught up in paying for all of this, that they completely lost track of their lofty goals, and making money became their obsession.

I suppose the moral of this story is, if you aspire to live the simple life, don't move to the burbs and send your kids to public school, as we did. Surround yourself with people who hold similar beliefs and ideals. Otherwise, you'll be just like the salmon, struggling to swim upstream.

P.S. Many thanks to sinaicentral.com for the above image.