“Turn on. Tune in. Drop out.”
I’ve used this Timothy Leary quote before, to poor effect, but it’s appropriate to use today as we face global climate change and have a nationwide one-day opportunity to realize a critical mass of social awareness.
Thursday, Jan. 31 is Focus the Nation, a nationwide “teach-in” that organizers hope will be the ’00 environmental equivalent of actions in the ’60s and ’70s that resulted from the civil rights movement, women’s rights movement and protests against the U.S. war in Vietnam. The hope of this “teach-in” is to influence not only how the issue of global climate change plays in society, but also how this issue plays in the selection of each party’s presidential nominee.
This organizational pitch of a “teach-in” theme made me think of other ideas that were flowing through college-aged social consciousness, some three or four decades back, that have recognizable parallels to the closing edge of this decade. This is where we need to consider Leary and his impact on the way we remember the “hippie era.”
If we’re actually going to realize wide-sweeping social, industrial and economic change, in terms of our concern about the climate, we’ve got to capitalize on the inertia of ideas that are already present in our consciousness.
While many people consider Leary’s catch phrase as a call to drop out of college and drop acid, his own account of the idea behind this call to action is much more nuanced, which he explained in his autobiography, “Flashbacks.”
Leary advocated that each individual individual should “turn on” by finding ways to “interact harmoniously with the world.” Once turned on, the individual could then “tune in” to the significance and presence of her or his personal existence by becoming “sensitive to the many and various levels of consciousness and the specific triggers that engage them.” The subsequent “drop out” was in effect little more than “self-reliance” in so much as it was “an elective, selective, graceful process of detachment from involuntary or unconscious commitments.”
If you set aside Leary’s drug use and drug advocacy for a moment and look at this call to action logically and structurally, it is very similar to what many of our politicians, scientists and environmental activists are telling us right now. We need to find ways to cause less impact on our environment and live more harmoniously with the cycles that have sustained our existence up to this point – turn on. We need to become aware of how our individual and collective actions impact the quality and quantity of future human life – tune in. And we need to implement these solutions in our lifestyles and industrial and economic systems – drop out.
These parallels, substituting intellectual thought and creative entrepreneurial acuity for LSD and mushrooms, hold the potential for us to change the world. That’s why most of us came to college in the first place, right? So how do we make the next move?
Well, it’s you – especially all you University instructors and professors – you need to take your students to the Focus the Nation events tomorrow because the one-time opportunity to academically and seriously address climate change issues far outweighs the 20-or-30-times-a-term opportunity to address coursework.
This is our future that we’re dealing with here, and it cannot be dealt with lightly or delayed indefinitely to “another day, sometime.” Focus the Nation is that day, and that day is Jan. 31, 2008.
Take the initiative. Use your professional skills to demonstrate how life, academics, learning and simple presence on a university campus are relevant to each individual’s contribution to creating a global climate change problem, or realizing a global climate change solution.
If you ignore this call to action, then on Friday, Feb. 1, 2008, and later, on Thursday, Feb. 1, 2018, and even on Tuesday, Feb. 1, 2028, a little voice in your head will whisper, “what if?” What if you had invested one hour of class time, way back in 2008 to spark a little inspiration in the mind of a University of Oregon student? What if?
If you choose to teach class instead of take your students to Focus the Nation, in 20 years you will not remember what you taught that day. You will not even remember what class you were teaching that term. But you will remember that you made a conscious decision to place the importance of one hour of class time over the importance of the chance to initiate positive social and environmental change on a national scale.
Opportunities like this do not come often.
Embrace this moment, when Al Gore’s decades of advocacy have given us a hunger to do good, when Barak Obama, in his historic move toward the presidency, implores “everybody to be involved with [Focus the Nation]… the largest campus teach-in, on global warming, in U.S. history,” and when even George W. Bush, freshly showered in sweet crude, calls on us in his State of the Union swan song to “complete an international agreement that has the potential to slow, stop, and eventually reverse the growth of greenhouse gases.”
Now is not the time to hesitate and think that somebody else will do something. You and your students are those “somebody elses,” so go, tune in, and on Monday, Feb. 1, 2038 we will all look back and remember, “Yeah, I was there.”
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