There May Be No Answer

Take the lid off an old box and your senses from decades ago may rush back into your present.

It was time to clean out an old organizational storage locker today, so my CIR co-founder Dan dropped by a few ancient boxes that were filled with files of mine from the 1970s.

It's hard to describe that era now in any way meaningful to anyone who didn't live here then. The physical City remains, a shell housing the remains of a culture that has almost vanished.

We were young, the 60s generation, called hippies and radicals, but really just American kids. We were idealistic, naive, hopeful.

But we also were bitterly disappointed, by the mid-70s, that our biggest social and political visions had proven unrealistic.

There was not going to be a revolution; furthermore, we'd begun to suspect that we hadn't known even remotely what we were talking about when we called for one.

The violence of the drug trade in the streets hinted at how ugly a revolution waged by "the people" would have quickly become.

Many of us started having kids, getting real jobs, growing up at last.

Through all of this I was pursuing my brand of journalism along with bands of others around my age.

Today's delivery brought that back.

I only took a few items, and quickly recycled most of those. It is tragic in a way -- more of our pre-digital history going into the impersonal recycling bin out front, but space is limited and I cannot think of anyone who would want this old stuff.

The paper is crumbling, it smells stale.

I saved a few letters, envelopes, files, some old copies of magazines and books, at least for a future day of reckoning.

Dan took an entire carload off with him to his house in Berkeley, where he will resort it and recycle much of the rest.



As he drove away, one box's label shot me the eternal question through his back window.

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