We all look to have transcendent experiences that lift us out of the everyday, and fear is a good one. But, I think it's the same reason why people want to laugh their heads off.
Yeah, man. It's time to let de people get good herbs and smoke. Government's a joke. All dey wan' is ya smoke cigarettes and cigar. Some cigar wickeder den herb. Yeah, man, ya can't smoke cigar. Smoke herb. Some big cigar me see man wit', God bless! Me tell him must smoke herb.
God tries you in certain, certain ways. Some people are rich, and they believe in God. They lose the money, things get hard, they get weak and quit going to church. Quit serving God like they did.
All that the world most needs today, is combined in the most seductive manner in his art, — the three great stimulants of exhausted people: brutality, artificiality and innocence (idiocy).
The problem is that young people are less likely to vote than older people. What results is a situation in which sometimes the elections don't fully reflect the views of the American population.
I understand why people are discouraged about Iraq. I can understand that. We live in a, you know, world in which people hope things happen quickly. And this is a situation where things don't happen quickly because there's, you know, a very tough group of people using tactics - mainly the killing of innocent people - to achieve their objective, and they're skillful about how they do this. And they also know the impact of what it means on the consciousness of those of us who live in the free world. They know that.
I am suspicious - first of all, in myself - of adopted mysticisms of glib spirituality, above all of white people's tendency to ... vampirize American Indian, or African, or Asian, or other 'exotic' ways of understanding.