I’m afraid of my government. I admit it’s not wholly rational. It’s not a matter of logical prudence like my fear of riding in a car without a seatbelt. I hit a windshield headfirst from the backseat once, and once was more than enough. A wealth of statistical and anecdotal evidence supports my caution. I don’t have to be nagged by that fear because it’s easily put to rest with the snap of a buckle. I sometimes hike in territories where I’m afraid of rattlesnakes, but I’m seldom troubled by that fear because I accept my risk-heightened alertness as part of the price and blessing of wildness. I also carry a fairly normal array of quasi-neurotic worries that seldom rise above the level of minor nuisance in my emotional life. A different kind of fear has arisen in the past decade—it’s something I consciously moved my life away from a long time ago. But fear was brought back by the people my tax dollars paid to keep it away. The interlude of years when I felt safe left me feeling fleeced and swindled.

In 1967, I graduated from high school and enrolled at Clarion, a small-town state college in northwestern Pennsylvania, where the wave of dissidence and weed didn’t roll in until a year after the Summer of Love. When it did, I caught the wave and rode it with a young man’s hormonal exuberance and hard-wired illusion of invincibility. It’s easy, among old friends who shared that era, to indulge in nostalgia—the standard, clichéd sentimentality that provides solace for old farts everywhere—but there was a dark side to the eros, freedom, and intoxication. We paid for our revelations and epiphanies with fear and loathing—with paranoia.

The herbs and chemicals which, to some difficult-to-assess degree, fueled our exuberant wildness were genuine, if naïve, catalysts for inner change, but they also painted a larger bull’s eye on our backs than the real issues at the heart of our dissidence. A police car pulling up in front of your house elicited a shiver of recognition that, at any moment, the vicious anonymous, authoritarian “they” could kick down your door and end life as you knew it.

The background constancy of that fear distributed it throughout the fabric of day-to-day life. Ironically, such paranoia doesn’t tend to inspire caution or prudence. Pervasive danger quickly ceases to be perceivable as amenable to caution. By consigning the threat of impending disaster to the realm of mysterious luck, it encourages bravery to degenerate into recklessness, especially in the young, and even more so when it reinforces an already visible group identity supported by righteous moral outrage.

In 1970, a hippie could walk onto virtually any college campus and get put up for a night or two, get high, and probably get laid. Our free-floating, tribal camaraderie was sustained by the very fear it enabled us to live with. It often fueled the recklessness by which we haphazardly courted the very dangers we all feared—getting beaten, busted, and jailed.

We took acid and went to classes. One of my special skills was my ability to roll joints while steering a car with my elbows. Once, in a small anti-war demonstration, even though I had a baggie of weed in my pocket, I defied a college administrator, daring him to summon the police and have me arrested. We reeked of marijuana smoke in public. We played obnoxiously loud music in smoke-filled houses. A lot of us, way too many of us, went to jail.

I was one of the lucky ones who somehow managed to blunder through those times legally unscathed. The busts went down all around me. Some rippled out in chain reactions from plea bargains, spurned lovers, and the panicked parents of careless or naively forthright hippies, while others struck with the inexplicable randomness of bad weather and car accidents. It became virtually impossible to look at a cop and see a man (they were all men in those days) who would even at great danger to himself, pull you out of a burning car wreck or face an armed thug in your defense. The cop was the armed man who would drag you out of your car, find your stash, arrest you without a warrant, and then cook up a fictitious probable cause situation to make it stick. He was a predator, a snake, a pig—the enemy, the evil, vicious guard dog of the great anonymous “they.”

The constancy of our fear was the day-to-day personal frontline in a larger war of many fronts, the largest of which were civil rights and the savage eruption of American dysfunction in Vietnam. It’s difficult to say whether our personal dissidence (in the form of music, drugs, sex, dress, etc.) enabled us to penetrate the gloss of patriotism and conformity and see the monstrous injustices of war and racism for what they were, or whether those injustices so outraged our youthful idealism that a whole array of connected social restraints collapsed like a house of cards. Both explanations are gross oversimplifications. The sources and manifestations of our dissidence lived in a far more complex symbiosis than simple, linear causation.

Some of my fellow students dropped (or were pushed) out of school and were dead in southeast Asia in less than a year. Vietnam and the draft attenuated our sense of possible future in a way we could only resist with various forms of bravado and recklessness. While we laughed, danced, fucked, and smoked, the Grim Reaper stood quietly in the background dressed in red, white, and blue.

One of my professors at Clarion, George Barber, became a close friend in a way that stood beyond the student/teacher relationship, age difference (he was my father’s age), and my ragged bellbottoms versus his suit and tie. Clarion was a third-rate, backwater college, but for a few years, its faculty harbored a significant minority which greeted this new generation’s surge of exuberance and rebellion with a welcoming affection our parents were too scarred by war and depression and stifled by the post-World War II wave of plastic affluence to offer. They accepted our eccentricities and fueled our revelations with art and literature. Those brave, bright teachers are the unsung, forgotten heroes of that era. They were the intellectual parents our biological parents were too paralyzed with fright and confusion to become.

One evening, George and I went out for a drink. Our first choice was a relatively upscale restaurant just outside of town, largely because my girlfriend worked there. The bartender asked me for proof of age. I didn’t have a Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board card, but I had driver’s licenses from Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and California. (In retrospect, I realized that one might have been better than all three.) It seemed as though having George to vouch for me should have counted for something, but it didn’t; the bartender refused to serve me.

We had been discussing Faulkner’s The Hamlet earlier in the day, and as we walked out the door, George put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Snopes.” We drove down the road to a well-worn country tavern. As we seated ourselves at the bar, George ordered a pitcher and two glasses. The bartender leaned across the bar, looked George in the eye, and asked, “Is that your boy?”

“Yes, he is,” George replied with a pride in his voice that I will never forget. When the bartender brought our beers, George clicked his glass with mine and said, “To Ratliff.”

George told me there were six students in his twenty years of teaching who made his career worthwhile. Five of them were at Clarion at that time. In two years all of them, including me, would be gone. He was worried about what would become of his life and career. I told George that I and many of my friends felt a similar way about our professors. We didn’t know what might have become of us if not for the wonderful happenstance of this concentration of brightness in the boondocks. George said, “It’s not an accident. You can thank Joe McCarthy.”

He explained that the McCarthy-era witch hunts had made a whole generation of artists and intellectuals flee to teaching jobs in small, obscure colleges far from the centers of government and media attention. When a generation of students came along who were actively jettisoning conformity and bravely defying fear, they welcomed us because we were their vindication and their salvation. We gave them a chance to believe in teaching again—to speak again. We were a living manifestation of all the energies they had stifled and repressed for more than a decade.

If the generation who came of age in the late sixties represented the repressed energies of those driven into obscurity by the McCarthy era, the killings at Kent State were a fierce eruption of that era’s dormant fascism and had a parallel effect. Fear wedded with cynicism grew and festered like an infection in the wound inflicted at Kent State.

When I received a draft notice a few months after Kent State, a trusted, sympathetic teacher told me how to easily evade it by claiming to harbor “homosexual tendencies.” Later, the lottery system turned the draft into a sinister game of chance whose losers felt more defeated by fate than assaulted by tyranny.

The half-life of our wildness was about a decade. Media-fueled culture digested the symbols and ceremonies of dissidence into ornament and cliché. We graduated. We got good jobs. We had children. We incrementally acquired a great deal to lose.

Three Mile Island aroused a brief spasm of fright, especially for those living in the mid-Atlantic region. But shockingly little of that fright ripened into outrage. Afterward, at the anti-nuclear protest march in Washington, the marchers were well-behaved, and the cops were friendly. No one was courting civil disobedience, let alone revolution. The watered-down late-sixties ambience was nostalgically pleasant, the speakers preached eloquently to the choir, and the music was good.

I married later than most and pulled my newfound abundance of love around myself like a warm blanket. Even employment I loathed gained an aura of meaning I hadn’t fully understood before. Political realities tended to recede into foggy abstraction in the face of the preoccupations of parenthood, an ongoing rediscovery of the Allegheny forests that were my true homeland, and a powerful determination to nurture my sense of myself as an artist amidst the plethora of small struggles commonly referred to as normal life.

The protective instincts aroused by the tender eyes of my children honed an old fear to a sharp, new edge. I joined the nuclear freeze movement because the horrific enormity of the fate our leaders were playing high-stakes nuclear poker against aroused a gulp of poignancy too large to grasp. We went to meetings and spoke to church and community groups. We thought the horror was so huge, the lunacy so self-evident, that we needed only to speak calmly and rationally. We thought our speaking up would be like seeding clouds—spreading nuclei around which vague fear would condense into a rain of specific, personal outrage. We were wrong—more wrong, more naïve than we had been as nineteen-year-old would-be revolutionaries. The movement fizzled out in the face of America’s flattened affect. The political world was awash in vague, righteous sound bites about patriotism, fighting communism, and the trustworthy shrewdness  (we had long ago given up any expectation of wisdom) of our leaders. Everything mainstream, patriotic, and political sounded suspiciously like a clever electronic remix of the sound of baaing sheep.

We lived with it. As years passed, fear of nuclear Armageddon faded like any constant sensation into a background of white-noise angst. Life went on; our children grew up. The Soviet Union unraveled. Launch-on-warning receded from the brink of imminence.

In the post-9/11 flood of grief, testosterone, and patriotism that fueled the American war machine, the greedheads, god snobs, closet Nazis, and those Hunter Thompson referred to as “flag-sucking halfwits” tried to rehabilitate the debacle of Vietnam. They tried to brand those who stood up against that lunatic wound to America’s collective soul as traitors and cowards. I can’t begin to compare my risks and sacrifices to those who were coerced and swindled into fighting that war, but those of us who organized, wrote, argued, marched, got threatened, tear gassed, beat up, and/or shot were patriots, too. Despite all the confusions of youth and the excesses of the times, the anti-war movement was an all-too-rare instance of collective nobility—an uprising of true patriotism. To brand that as treason is to dismiss everything good, noble and true in the character of the American people.

Yes, when the Towers went down, when the Pentagon got clobbered, when I thought about the innocents on those planes, I got seriously pissed off. But the simple truth is that I’m not wise, nice, or even smart when I’m seriously pissed off. When someone succeeds in making me feel righteous and proud of being unwise, ignorant, rash, and vicious, they have succeeded in degrading my humanity. I’m not and never have been a Christian, but I do recognize that the wisest courage is to refuse the stupidity of righteous rage. It seems fundamentally vital not to allow our enemies to force us to mimic their hate, fear, and aggression.

As a Buddhist, I recognize that one of my most common personal failings is that I am often guided by insufficient compassion. The horrific madness of events like those of 9/11 loosens our grip on our meager store of wisdom; it compounds our shock and grief by making us react stupidly. True leaders should attempt to lead us away from that trap. America had no true leaders.

My son was in the opening weeks of his freshman year of college on September 11, 2001. When the United States invaded Iraq, our society was awash in flag waving, but all I felt was a gut-wrenching fear that “they” would take my son. My country, in a terrible spasm of grief, confusion, and greed, was sending its young people to kill and die while cloaking the whole sordid spectacle in simplistic blather about patriotism, duty, and glory. It made me want to weep and puke. I had seen it before and I had seen enough.

Americans were proud of “Shock and Awe.” I have to admit it gave me a small, chuckled thrill to see a twenty-foot Saddam statue topple. What kind of flaming asshole would erect huge statues of himself? But I react to humans killing other humans only with shock. I reserve awe for mountains, the ocean, the birth of my son, the aurora borealis, the vastness of the tundra, meteor showers, eclipses, and orgasms. I don’t like hearing “awe” used to describe people killing other people, no matter who the good guys happen to be; it profanes the holy and insults my insight.

The war settled into long-term malaise while invertebrate politicians on both sides of the aisle pre-defined the risks of freedom as unacceptable, even as they loudly proclaimed their dedication to defending it. Our Bill of Rights was treated as a mere technicality, an academic nicety that stood in the way of the exercise of manly virtues in defense of a vague notion of liberty meant to be possessed, but not exercised.

We’re in deep shit, my friends. Can we become wild one more time before our trajectory returns us to the Earth? What would that wildness look like? These are not rhetorical questions. I really don’t know.

But I’m deeply frightened by our collective willingness to sacrifice our sons and now, in the age of equal rights, our daughters too. Let’s cut the crap and admit it: Our soldiers aren’t dying so we can be free; they’re dying so we can stay fat.

I say to our government: You want me to pay taxes? Some of those taxes will pay for things I consider inappropriate or uninteresting, but I don’t expect our lawmakers, or anyone else, to be right one-hundred percent of the time, and I recognize the necessity of compromise. We should all honor that. You want me to vote in elections? Voting is the foundation of democratic government. We should all honor that. You want me to refrain from driving after I decide to have the third drink? No one’s safety should be compromised by drunks on the road. We should all honor that. You want me to sacrifice my child to protect your profits, seek vengeance, get you re-elected, or change some other country’s political system? Go to hell.

Unfortunately, ranting is too easy and mostly benefits the importers of scotch. As I said earlier, I’m not wise, nice, or even smart when I’m pissed off. I hoped that as my generation grew old we would find a way to merge our wildness with wisdom, but when we came to power we were like any stew that hasn’t been stirred in a long time—a lot of scum rose to the top. We got Slick Willie and Dubya. Those of us who hid in the margins waiting for the wild to rise again are still waiting. Some of us are howling—we owe at least that to our aging, stifled hearts. We owe much more to our children.

The faint desperate howling of my generation’s gray, ragged remnant of inner wildness was very much on my mind as I watched Barack Obama’s victory speech on November 4, 2008. The particular place of that event was laden with personal resonance. In 1975, I was an art student in Chicago. Traveling to and from school, I stopped at the art museum virtually every day. I was enthralled by paintings. One day as I left the museum with Hans Hofmann’s The Golden Wall erupting in my brain, and my thoughts boiling over with images and ideas, with the sheer magical substance of paint, I needed to sit a while before enduring the sensory bludgeoning of the el. I crossed the street to Grant Park and sat on the bench built into the curved wall facing the statue of Abraham Lincoln. It was a handy spot I’d sat in before, but also the kind of cul-de-sac I hadn’t yet learned to prudently avoid. Absorbed in my journal, I didn’t see the two moderately scruffy-looking men until they were only a few feet away, one on either side, in front of me. Seated with my back to the wall, I could neither run nor readily access my knife. Besides, these weren’t the drunken barflies I sometimes had to deal with going to the el from my apartment; they were predators.

“We need some money, man.”

“I don’t have any.”

“We don’t believe you.”

“That’s your problem.”

“No, that’s your problem.”

Just then a tall black man, wearing a bright purple jumpsuit and a floppy hat with a joint tucked into the hatband where one might normally put a feather, stepped around the corner of the wall and said, “Hey man, are these boys bothering you?”

“They sure are.”

“Do want me to hurt `em?”

The would-be muggers vanished in great haste. My strange protector sat down beside me, plucked the joint from his hatband, and lit it.

“My name is Rico. Do you want a hit?”

I certainly did.

And now, over three decades later, in that same park, a black man had stepped around the corner and offered my country a second chance. The cynicism I had learned to wear as my personal mind armor was not enough to stop my tears.

Still, there is the reality of decades of war and power lust that linger as scar tissue in my heart and soul. Barack Obama wrote a book called The Audacity of Hope, and I certainly welcome the ray of hope he has given us. But the audacity I need to see now is more than hope and beyond politics. We have a new president who was but a toddler when my generation was wakening to its wildness. He offers a ray of hope that is indeed audacious. But will he dare to howl with us?

Is Barack Obama’s heart wild enough to stir a new generation that we boomer-geezers can welcome, as George Barber’s generation of teachers greeted us? Can we reignite the flaming wildness that sputtered out in the decades of malaise that followed our confused and embarrassed scramble out of the moral muck of Vietnam? Can that wildness be the torch that America carries forth into the world, instead of white phosphorous and smart bombs? That’s the hope I fear I’ve become too cynical to embrace.

In my daily life, I make a conscious effort to cultivate a positive attitude. Recognizing aspects of my own character that incline me toward darkness, I often rely on a compensatory brightness in others for balance. As I try to navigate toward geezerhood with reasonable grace, my appreciation of positive attitudes grows steadily and I find a degree of sunny naiveté preferable by far to bitterness.

Still, I must admit that I find myself unable to speak of the hope and optimism inspired by political events such as Barack Obama’s electoral victory without feeling an undercurrent of embarrassment. I would love to wholly believe that a President of the United States could be a genuine beacon of light and hope. Sadly, when my thoughts go there they just don’t ring true. I recently finished writing a book that required me to spend over three years working hard at not bullshitting myself.

Yes, President Obama represents a new ray of hope, but our country is deeply entangled in terrible wrongs of which any president will have to partake. I doubt the political possibility of the true radicalism we need and that the world needs from us. While we continue to pump obscene and inconceivable amounts of money into a bloated military, we are staggering headlong into worldwide environmental collapse, disease and malnutrition run rampant in much of the world, and our own working poor lack access to health care. Even if this president is all that we hope he will be, at the end of his term he will have been complicit in the deaths of innocents. While I appreciate the courageous pragmatism it will take to make progress amidst enormous corruption, I confess that I lack the audacity to reconcile this dawning hope, for which I am so grateful, with the viciousness of my country’s deeply entrenched greed and power lust. For much of my generation, the ambivalence of hope is the best we can muster. But in the eyes of my grandchildren, I see a brightness that makes me cling to a fragile, frightened hope that perhaps, my jaded weariness is wrong.