An Amuse Bouche to this Blog Post….
The hipster ethos:
"X is just a need created by Corporation Y to sell you product Z. Also, buy my homemade artisanal green version.”
(I don’t twitter but The Walt Whitman does. That is Hip.)
I was asked to write a modern day ethos telling you
how to live in today’s world,
what we should value,
whom we should scorn,
what ideas we should question,
and how to act rightly in the world.
The word, “responsibility,” came to mind and I immediately began hyperventilating...
This is the original Walt Whitman ethos I was to attempt to lovingly imitate.
Hip: The History
By John Leland
“…a founding hipster manifesto.” (Leland 41)
This is what you shall do: love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning god, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint in your body.
Walt Whitman, from the preface to Leaves of Grass
After a hit off of my inhaler and one hour of meditation in the form of a cat nap,
I gathered inspiration from the wicked muses that haunt my favorite sub psyche
some may call,
“dreams.”
By the time those ideas reached the surface,
I was convinced the words that purged had been nibbled,
scraped,
poked by a sea urchin,
taken for a 300 MPH joy ride from an optimistic dolphin,
and regurgitated from the mouth of a scared shark.
I give you…
The Creation of America
This is what you shall do: revolutionize products that sustain the earth, animals, and human beings, soothe cancerous rays by destroying fossil fuels and tobacco dependencies, barter real ideas instead of paying for others, define love and gratify its arrival, understand hate, rewire your human connections to gain compassion in a wireless world, under expose yourself, participate in a social recession, understand the languages of all others, fiddle with patience in your pocket if others do not understand you, embrace the mythology of religious texts, give those people a mirror who take their god literally and let them finally see who god is, give science a chance to prove or disprove all theories, use technology only as a tool, man created it, man is never perfect, stuff will break, man will invent new tools, remove inconvenience and replace it with kindness when around a slow child, elder, or person in need, fly with the doves of peace when a man and man or woman and woman shall marry, sow your selfish ego as a growing young adult, throw away all that you’ve obtained and fertilize a failing community when you’ve embraced the manhood or womanhood that resides within you, exercise the freedoms fought for you, celebrate your sports heroes stats and argue when referee congressman make bullshit calls, remove the thugs out of Wall street, tolerate and tax drugs, recycle, reuse, reduce, refuse disposable politicians and plastics, educate and evolve your self, obtain a library card, motivate the movement of your body, breathe deeply and see freely, live in this global world as a citizen of your soul, live not to avoid hell, create your divine version of heaven on earth.
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