Influences

When I was a kid growing up, there were a lot of conflicts. There was the Vietnam War.

This war made no sense. One of my heroes was Muhammed Ali. A lot of people still called him Cassius Clay and said his fights were fixed, but I was impressed that he knocked Sonny Liston out after only 61 seconds of the 1st round.

People said he was a coward for resisting the draft. But I thought he was pretty macho. Heavyweight champ Muhammed Ali said,

“Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality. If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail, so what? We’ve been in jail for 400 years.”

Of course, he was silenced and stripped of his heavyweight title. People marched against the Vietnam War because it was wrong and stupid and a waste of human life. The soldiers who went there to strafe women and children with machine gun bullets from helicopters were not heroes. They were mostly scared teenagers trying to be men. They came home from war scarred for life.

My generation protested against the war.  Right wing preachers thundered from the pulpits that we had to support the war. 

We were antipatriotic, unhshaven long-haired hippies. The war continued.

The soldiers marched on. And the murder of innocent people went on.

I Could see that Muhammed Ali was right. Black people in the United States also wanted their rights. While the Vietnam War went on, Martin Luther King marched to Washington D.C.

He said that we could bring change nonviolently by following the principles of Gandhi.

Gandhi speaking before a huge crowd

Gandhi preaching nonviolence

Meanwhile in high school, my most interesting class was the language class: Russian. I fell in love with a girl in the class and we read Tolstoy together. We went to the movies and saw Dr. Zhivago and read Tolstoy. I found that Gandhi was really a follower of Tolstoy, who had read Thoreau on Civil Disobedience. Thoreau was a real hippy before it was cool. 

He wrote a book about getting back to nature and living close to the earth, called Walden. Everyone was reading Walden. It was about peace. 

Thoreau got his ideas from the Bhagavad-gita. So did Gandhi. I began thinking, "How is it possible that my literary hero, Tolstoy and my political hero, Gandhi, got their ideas from the same book? What is this Bhagavad-gita?"

In Thoreau's seminal book on getting back to nature, he wrote, "In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavad-Gita, in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seems puny and trivial."

Lines began to cross. I was against the war in Vietnam and would go to the protests with some of my friends. Everyone talked about nonviolence and Gandhi. Gandhi read the Bhagavad-gita. I studied Russian with my girlfriend. We went to see the 7-hour film version of War and Peace with Russian subtitles. Tolstoy read Bhagavad-gita. Some of my friends were hippies. They wanted to get back to the land. Leave the corrupt world of mega-cities like Los Angeles. Be natural. They read Thoreau. And Thoreau read Bhagavad-gita. Where could I find a copy? I had to get my hands on this book and try to understand what these great thinkers were reading.