I think that we should celebrate the unique individuals in society. Not everyone has to conform for sure. Our natural tendency, however, is to look exactly like our parents if we can. But over time, especially once we go to school, we have a tendency to lose that. Now when I was young, I was born in 1956, so I’m just at the very tail end of the so called baby boomers.
And I was born in Canada, which of course is distant from The United States, but we still had our time of change, of excitement. We didn’t really know much about the Vietnam War, for instance, at the time, which existed from 1955 to 1975, killing millions of Vietnamese and of course thousands 50 something thousand Americans as well. Greatly sad, greatly tragic. That said, this movement of love and peace eventually was upon us and the music was very unique of course for the time, etcetera, etcetera. But we had to look cool.
We had to look different. So everyone bought blue jeans and they were real blue jeans. They weren’t the blue jeans we buy today for instance that are already faded. We had to fade our own. So we would go and smoke, and everyone smoked, and then we would put the ash upon our jeans.
We’d rub it into our jeans, and the whiter the jeans became, the cooler you were, the cleverer you were. I remember once my mother found my jeans because you couldn’t wash these jeans, of course. She found my jeans and she washed them. And I went to school with blue jeans once again, and everyone was just horrified. Leon, what happened?
Oh, my mother washed my jeans. Oh, what a drag, man. We used to tag all our sentences with man at the end, and I had really a difficult relationship with my father because he could see the change that was overcoming me. My hair was longer, etcetera, etcetera. I always tried to be as nice as I could.
So one time, I arrived home. He was home for whatever reason, and I said to my father, how’s it going, man? And he just exploded. He said, man, I’m not a man. I’m your father.
And so I said to him, relax, man. So you can see kind of foolishly, and he went even crazier. And then I got a perm, and I have naturally curly hair, but I got a perm, and it looked like a toilet brush. My hair went straight up, and my good friend, Blake Richardson, who’s now a doctor, retired, I think, probably, he pierced my ear with a potato so I had an earring, and I had this toilet brush afro, if you will. My poor dad, he must have been going crazy.
And I remember I went to Hungary at 19 years old wearing these coveralls and the hair straight in the air and the earring. And this was a time in Hungary behind the iron curtain and everyone extremely conservative. They thought really literally I was a Martian. I’d come from another place in space and time. And so it goes.
So today, whenever we meet a unique individual, now the tattoo is the big one, isn’t it? We have to give them space and say it’s okay to be a bit unique, a bit different. But, I mean, there are extremes, of course. I worked with a man who actually had earrings just like the Inca sun kings. And, I mean, there was no earlobe left, really.
I think over time, he was going to be a difficult human being to employ, for sure. It wasn’t going to be easy. But in my village when I was growing up, there was a very unique man. And he had a piece of land at the entrance to the village and he bought these enormous metal disused gasoline tanks. It used to be a huge airbase around our village.
They dug up these tanks. He took them back to his property, which is the entrance to the village, and and he proceeded to build the Tower Of Babel. As you can imagine, right from the bible, he’s building it to the sky. And eventually, the village elders could take no more, and they got a whole group of people to petition him to take this Tower Of Babel down. And he didn’t want to.
And finally, they probably sued him in the end, public eyesore or something, and it he lost. And I think it broke him. Eventually, he fell into the bottle, the alcohol, whatever, and he died not too long after this. So I think, gosh, we gotta revere the people, the poets, the painters, the musicians, the people with long hair, short hair, tattoos, you know, the the people that are trying to make a living on the streets, perhaps, not the beggars themselves, but the people that are looking to garnish money somehow in another way. Because these are the people that give life color.
We don’t all have to be the same, don’t we? But something I do think is true though, we don’t like laziness as a society. And I think it’s very unhealthy for people to do nothing. Just sit there and beg. Begging with some show, maybe you have some act you’re performing.
I mean, that’s different, isn’t it? But just begging there with a cup, I think this is wrong. Because idleness is really going to kill all of us. If we don’t learn to be industrious as human beings, eventually we’ll never be able to feed ourselves, will we? And I think there is some danger with this, especially with the Internet age.
You know, if you look over at the average person as you walk along, you realize that the most people are on the phone. And what they’re doing on the phone is they’re not studying philosophy. I can tell you, they’re many times playing games or they’re just scrolling useless information for the most part. This is not going to help us at all. So I would say go on in life, be as unique as you want, but most assuredly appreciate that you are a precious human being.
You have a lot to contribute. There’s no one like you as I’ve often said, and you know what they say. You know what they say. Critical thinking is necessary, especially if you’re going to be that wonderful, unique human being that’s going to contribute to society, and critical thinking is great. So go on.
Be as unique as you want, but please take care. God bless. Bye bye.