Closing In

Part 2: San Francisco and the meaning of tolerance

Another learning experience was as a teenager in San Francisco. I had gone with a friend to a music store in South San Francisco that sold dozens of kinds of drumsticks. My friend (now a studio musician in LA) wanted to try some new sticks out.

Then as now, tolerance was a word that got lots of play. In San Francisco, you could do and say lots of things that would get you arrested anywhere else. You could pee, take a dump or drop your pants in public. You could yell obscenities. In San Francisco of the 70's, all you had to do to get a cheer was yell loudly, "**** Nixon". You could dress up like a nun, yell obscenities about religion and drop your pants in the middle of a parade. (You still can for that matter) Hookers and drug dealers were everywhere in the parts of town that attracted wayward teens. I remember waiting in line to get into the massive Rock Concerts they held in the Oakland Coliseum called "Day on the Green" and being amazed at the amounts and types of drugs being publicly used and sold. A van tried to get through this line of dazed concert-goers (this was an hour before the concert even started) and no one moved to open a space for the van to get out. One entrepreneur in line who couldn't afford enough weed to get blasted offered to open a space in exchange for a giant "doobie". (Appropriately, the Doobie Brothers were one of the 3 groups playing that day, along with Gary Wright and Fleetwood Mac - great concert by the way) He cajoled and pushed a space for the van to get through and was rewarded by a giant doobie the size of a small football. Anyway, almost anything went.

Except morality. A common teen word in that time was to call someone "homo" if they did anything nice - or just if you felt like it. My friend and I were horsing around and calling each other various names - one of which was homo. Some guy came up and started telling us how evil we were. We were puzzled and didn't get what great sin we had done. Anyway, this was the first time I noticed this California attitude of anything being ok unless it made a moral judgement. Over and over, friends who went to San Francisco began to notice that they were treated rudely, sworn at, given the finger and even spit on if they were even overheard in a private conversation to comment on things like the streets smelling like urine from all the bums (oops, homeless) or wondering why the police didn't do something about the hookers and drug dealers.

Another valuable lesson for modern American Society - tolerance only works one way. It means that you must tolerate every kind of sick and twisted behavior even though it is obviously harmful to practitioners themselves - and that no one need tolerate decent views. I remember my church urging its members oppose a law legalizing bestiality in the early 70's - it passed anyway of course.

Anyway, freedom of speech is long gone in California. You don't dare speak out there about religion, morality or conservative principles. And this is coming to the rest of the US too. These last elections were a big jump toward a future where you can speak of anything except God and morality.

Next blog - Closing In: Part III Loss of freedom of speech continued

Vincet Veritas, MEB