IDEALS AT WORK
Enriching the Lives of Many
by Dave Smith • Ukiah, CA

Once upon a time, members of my generation broke free and created what was labeled a “counterculture.” Because the surrounding culture was not living up to our young ideals, we began creating our own work, our own services, and our own communities.

I prefer to call what many of us were doing a “parallel culture,” as my experience was more about building something new rather than countering or opposing. Between the straight culture and the anticulture, we chose to be part of a third way, seeking to build something positive out of the chaos rather than just spending all our time protesting and demonstrating. We chose to compose new social and workplace structures and relationships, practicing and feeling them, discovering how to make them meaningful and how to restore a measure of love and joy and amazing grace to our daily work. Sure, we made mistakes, but we were willing to fail young rather than take our assigned places and nod off into the ethical and moral wasteland we found around us.

Along with many others, I had responded to John F. Kennedy’s call to service. We believed we could and would change the world, and we did. Along with our protests and marches for civil rights, farm workers’ contracts, and the environment, we organized free universities, cooperative food stores, and small alternative community businesses. We had passionate faith in the future and look back now with pride at our accomplishments. We stopped a war. We put civil rights into law. We shut down the building of new nuclear plants. We passed the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act — every one of them now being chipped away by the culture that was then being countered. We created movements built around human potential, women’s rights, the environment, alternative health, and natural foods. Many of the positive results have by now been diffused into the overall culture as part of our everyday lives. One of many examples is how the organic foods market has gone mainstream, while enjoying a 20% annual growth.

For me, the sixties and seventies were not about selfishness and doing our own thing, an interpretation that has been perversely sensationalized by the media. Those years were delightfully exuberant with passion, idealism, possibility, higher vision, and work from the heart. They were a way out of the suffocating soullessness imposed by a scientific materialist worldview-- the conformity that corporate mega machine behaviorism requires, and the individualistic selfishness hyped by its marketing. Alienated by the rugged cowboy models of isolated, independent manhood, many of us practiced tribal values of mutual aid and support, the common good in community, and the use of our gifts and creativity for others. We relearned how to take responsibility for each other, have faith in each other, help each other, care about each other, share with each other, cooperate with each other—values that have kept cultures together since humankind began. We were lighthearted and joyous in our abilities to live simply and walk lightly on the Earth. We worked hard at what we believed in and had an enormous amount of fun doing it. Our daily life glowed with purpose and meaning, and we believed deeply what one of the Beat writers, Jack Kerouac, had written: that without feeling and emotion, nothing can really be known. He was echoing Thoreau, who said that a person has not really seen a thing who has not felt it.

As budding business persons, we were inspired and energized by the psychologist Abraham Maslow. Maslow wrote that personal salvation is a by-product of self-actualizing work and self-actualizing duty, and that the proper management of the work lives of human beings can improve them and improve the world.

But we lost our way. We were devastated by the deaths of progressive political leaders, brought down so suddenly and shockingly, and we were left lamenting what could have been. The Vietnam War dragged on as the positive and creative alternatives gave way to deep divisions and antagonism. Many of us gave it all up to despair, drugs, and deluded insurrections. And in our confusion we took the easy way out and lost ourselves by moving back into what the institutions of our culture had planned for us all along: safe careers, cake and circuses, bright shiny chariots, and commutes to tall buildings. Sure, you could say that we were on the losing side of the culture wars, or you could say it was simply time for us to grow up, move on, raise our families, and take our places of responsibility. Many of us turned inward, feeling that the only real change is spiritual and psychological, and that what is important is personal growth. But personal growth without an eventual return to the scene of the crimes to take up compassionate action is only escape into navel-gazing denial and the postponement of personal and social defeat. The goal is not either/or, it’s both/and. It takes both personal growth and social involvement to live the purposeful, meaningful life that is the fulfillment of our human potential.

Sustainable business pioneer Dave Smith, co-founder of Smith & Hawken, is a key figure in the organic food movement. He has held leadership positions in Real Goods, Diamond Organics, and Seeds of Change. In 2004, Dave co-founded Organic Bouquet, the first national organic flower company, and is currently part of the team introducing Organic To Go, a chain of fast-food restaurants offering fast pre-made organic meals for pick-up and delivery.

Excerpted from To Be of Use: The Seven Seeds of Meaningful Work ©2005, by Dave Smith. Reprinted with permission of New World Library, Novato, CA, USA 94949. 1-800-441-2100, http://www.newworldlibrary.com