Hippie paradise lost, thanks to pandemic

I grew up watching the first "Star Trek" series and still hold a fondness for the actors in the original crew. Despite the campiness of the 1960s plots, the series addressed some interesting issues.

Recently, I re-watched a 1969 episode entitled "The Way to Eden" in which the Enterprise rescues some space-age hippies searching for the quasi-mythical planet of Eden. The hippies, determined to live in peace and harmony with nature, take over the Enterprise to locate Eden. But when they land a shuttle on the planet, they find their paradise – as beautiful as it is – is deadly, with all the vegetation so acidic that it burns their skin and kills anyone who eats the fruit.

Now keep this in mind as we turn our attention to a group of modern-day hippies who gathered from all over the world for their annual festival to celebrate peace and harmony with nature. They call themselves the Tribal Gathering, and this year's festival was held in a stunning beachside location in Panama.

According to their website, "The north coast of Panama has a raw unexplored quality. Large swaths of exotic jungle sweep down to the coast. The flora and fauna is amazing, monkeys, sloth, jaguar, cayman and a multitude of colorful birds. A balmy 30 C° with a constant refreshing breeze. Golden sandy beaches, majestic bays, rock pools and coral reefs, a river and a waterfall, making it the perfect location for Tribal Gathering. The region has a rich cultural blend of local indigenous and Afro-Caribbean heritage. People are lively and friendly. And their traditional cuisines make for simple but delicious food! This truly is a paradise on earth."

(Paradise on earth. Remember that.)

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The website continues with travel advice: "Getting here is relatively simple. Approximately three hours' drive from Tocumen International Airport. Buses are regular and cheap, or if you want it easier we provide a shuttle service to and from the site."

The Tribal Gathering website touts the superiority of indigenous cultures over Western culture ("Let's put an end to injustice and work together to ensure environmental and social balance") and includes a quote from someone named Autumn Peltier: "Kids all over the world have to pay for mistakes we didn't even make. This is our future. We're the next leaders. This is our future."

(We're the next leaders. This is our future. Remember that.)

Now, however, it appears the hippies are having trouble in paradise. After two weeks of utopia – swimming in tropical waters, dancing to drums, participating in psychedelic trances, building organic driftwood structures, massages, meditation and otherwise "detoxifying" mind, body and soul (while the local population provided them with food, water and toilet facilities) – the festival participants learned they couldn't go home due to pandemic travel restrictions, leaving dozens of international attendees stranded on the beach without food, cleaning products, or "tobacco."

"If you want to eat food here, you have to buy it," the horrified participants were told by an organizer, who added that those unable to afford to buy food would have the option of performing manual labor in exchange for meals. Stealing food would not be tolerated.

"At first it was like paradise," said one man. "But when you are locked in, it is not paradise anymore."

Initially, participants didn't see much change. They still had food and water, ice cream and fresh orange juice. But then the military and police showed up and began regulating how people could leave. Those caught sneaking out were forcibly returned to the beach, and their passports confiscated. Eventually, the lockdown was lifted, but by then most flights out of the country had been canceled.

The self-created "global community" embraced by participants quickly fractured into distinct nationalities when it came clear that departure hinged on specific embassies. Those left behind struggled with bad weather and major sewage issues. Suddenly the participants wanted nothing more than to abandon the indigenous cultures and get home to their Western lifestyle, a lifestyle privileged leftists famously want to see extinct.

The fate of these hippies is simply a microcosm of larger issues. In one form or another, progressives have always longed to impose draconian control on everyone else. Apparently, it's another matter entirely when such controls are forcibly imposed on them.

"One doesn't want to laugh too much at their misfortune," observed Paul Joseph Watson on Summit News, "but dear God, this is funny."

The District Herald agreed. "While the situation is terrible, of course, it has also become extremely comical. The hippies are now being forced to live in their theoretical utopia – and they aren't having the amazing time that they imagined."

As frequently happens when "woke" people gather, there's an underlying thread of condescension directed at the indigenous groups they claim to love ("Look at the quaint tribes and how they live in harmony with nature! They can teach us!"). But when push comes to shove and those quaint indigenous people go back to their quaint environments, the stranded hippies turn into elitists, demanding the locals do their bidding by providing supplies and transportation.

What this demonstrates is that unless "woke" people are actively engaged in what it takes to survive (and to be fair, many are), their lifestyle is usually subsidized by the labors of others who provide them with organic free-trade arugula or whatever. The utopia-seekers found out utopia works just great as long as someone else provides the essentials. But now, they're getting a taste of their own medicine when their elitism is stripped away – and they don't like it.

This is the one thing hippies and other lib types can't seem to grasp. Their versions of utopia means they – the elite – are never the ones doing the nitty-gritty details like growing and transporting food, cleaning the latrines, or providing ice cream, fresh orange juice, cleaning products and tobacco. Rather, the hippies just want to "live for today" without doing the work necessary to make that living possible.

If this COVID-19 pandemic has done nothing else, it has removed the left's pretty glove of social justice and climate change to reveal the iron fist of tyranny beneath, while the rest of us point out this is just a taste of things to come if progressives get their way.

The "Star Trek" hippies found that Eden was no paradise. This is what the hippies in Panama have discovered as well. Utopia is very acidic. It burns the skin and eventually kills anyone who eats its fruit.

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