An Unbreakable Legacy

By Keith Rockwell / Fall 2021

This paper attempts to put my history and my future in the context of greater social forces and look at how the pressure and rejection of these forces have shaped who I and those around me are, and who we are going to become. My father, born in 1954, came of age in the summer of love. With his experience came great revelations of how to be, along with great hardships in choosing to live in rejection of the mainstream. My mother was born in 1964 in Prague Czech Republic under the boot of the USSR; the west was everything she didn't have. She was attracted to the freedom of choice, accessibility of goods, and most of all freedom of expression she saw in the west. Her earliest memory was the Russian retaliation against the Prague Spring of 1968. Tanks and military force came into the city, locked it down and put everyone in a state of fear. She was by no means a die hard capitalist, but she yearned for a more free and prosperous life. The future under the USSR looked grim. In 1988 when she was 19, she fled over the alps into Slovenia, where she lived in a refugee camp for six months before she was granted immagration into Canada. She endured the harshness of the refugee camps, initially sharing quarters with prostitutes and drug addicts and women from all sorts of downtrodden backrounds. She married her boyfriend at the time so they could be placed into a family refugee camp with better living conditions. She told me stories about crying at her wedding because she did not want to get married, but she knew it was what she had to do to improve her quality of life.

My parents met some ten years later and eventually brought me and my sister into this world. Armed with a group of ragtag counter-culturist family friends, they raised us in a way that was different from the mainstream. As young children, me and my sister prospered in our little world of family traditions like food, festivals, camping trips, and an affinity for being out in nature. Thrust into the public school system, we initially struggled. We felt like we didn't know anything, how to behave, how to interact with kids with more straight edge backgrounds, how to learn. We just felt different. Over the years, we have found our individual strides in life and in the school system, and I attribute this to our unusual background. It gave us the tools to think critically about the world around us. I never did well in lower education. Disillusioned with the structure, I put in the bare minimum and got out the same, but here I am about to graduate from UCSD. My sister on the other hand excelled in K-12 education, was the student body president at our high school, and is currently attending Yale University.

This paper seeks to contextualize my parents’ journey, me and my sister’s upbringing and our future paths. While our experiences may be unique, my hope is that the reader will be able to relate to not only the factors that shaped who I am, but the emotions and sentiments I invoke. My biggest questions are: how do I live a meaningful life, one with purpose that grounds me to the people and environment around me? How do I balance that with income security? How do I create the life I want for me and my family without selling my soul to capitalism? In the end, family comes first and I think people sacrifice some or much of themselves to provide for their family. My goal is to walk that line—the line between the life I want and prosperity for those I love. I think there are many people out there asking the same question. While you might not relate with my exact experiences, I hope you can relate with my aspirations.

My father was born in Marin County, an area that at the time was a lightly populated summer getaway for San Francisco city folk. His early life consisted of running around in the hills and woods of bay, oak, and pine trees. I remember the stories he would tell me when I was younger of the times he would spend back there, running around, playing cowboys and indians, and searching the dry creek beds for arrowheads. He always had one that he had found to show me while telling this story. His early communions with nature brought a desire from early on to live a life that was measured by qualitative aspects rather than quantitative. This innate desire mixed with the social movements of the 60s, turned him into a rebel at an early age. To him, the government with its neoliberal drum beat, endless wars and international interventions, march of materialism, and its drive to conform people into a compliant, homogeneous society became the enemy.

Intertwined with his rebellion was also drug culture. Psychedelics played a huge role in many of the counterculture movements of the 1960s. It was the first time in human history when psychedelic compounds of such power were massively available to the population at large. They opened people's eyes to a different reality- one that wasn’t measured by monetary and material gains, but one that was measured by quality of relationships with beings and nature. Psychedelics emphasized the interconnectedness of all things, and made it painstakingly clear that you were one with nature, deeply connected and intertwined with the environment around you. This was a way of being that many non- western cultures had understood for thousands of years and discovered through meditation, shamanic rituals, and a general coexistence with nature. This discovery through drug use was a double edged sword. It opened peoples’ eyes to the magic of this world, made them feel an undeniable sense of connection and purpose, but also led to dependency and abuse. Unlike non-western peoples who discovered this truth through natural means, westerners using these substances were given all the answers before they had contemplated all the questions and before they had the discipline or self control required of this understanding. Just a little bit can open your eyes to the magic of this world, too much can bring you to a very dark place. This rabbit hole led to an over use of psychedelics which often led to a dive into more harmful and addictive substances. The same is true for my dad. He started with weed, mushrooms and LSD in his adolescence, moved into other drugs in his late teens, and was involved with drugs in one way or another for the majority of his life. This is no discredit to his great achievements, and purposeful life. It is merely a fact of the matter of a different era.

With his eyes opened at an early age, he, like so many others, chose a life of rebellion against the system wherever he could. He lived by a system that I call outlaw ingenuity. Thriving however he could, as long as it didn’t break his code of ethics. Whether it required him to live in self crafted teepees, work long hours doing construction, or growing and selling the finest herb. As long as it did not exploit people or the environment, he would do what he loved and had to, to get by.

He shared many of the same sentiments and ideologies with the counterculture movements of the 60s. Marked by the greatest movements of civil unrest and collective rejection of the status quo in U.S. history, the 60’s counterculture posed a very real threat to the powerful elite who ran and continue to run the system. The elite needed a new way to control the masses, and neoliberalism had the solution. They designed a system of deregulation, consumerism, and debt, that would crush the free idealist souls of the counter culturists. Chained to the burden of debt, potential revolutionaries would be forced to comply and conform (Chomsky, Requiem for the American Dream).

The first way they did this was through an ending of free public higher education. In the 60s you could go to a public university for next to nothing. You easily afford tuition and all your necessities, working part time. Unburdened by debt, students viewed education as an enriching experience. They explored the humanities, set out to understand the world around them, and began to contemplate the bigger questions of life. The more they asked the more they realized the answer was nothing short of a revolution- a complete reorganization of society, and what it values. This influenced the counterculture movements of the 60s and became a massive threat to those who hold power and benefited from the system as it was. The powerful devised a plan to burden students with debt from the very first day of school, before they would even have the chance to ask these big questions, or consider their answers. They shifted tuition responsibility from the state to the students. Chained to debt, students now had to look at school as an input-output institution. If a student was going to put in x amount of money, and acquire x amount of debt, then they needed to get a degree that was going to put out y amount of money, that could pay off their debt and guarantee a certain amount of income (Wendy Brown, On Education). This resulted in the death of humanities studies, and an explosion of interest in business, economics and stem majors. Students went from critiquing and pushing against the system to learning how to prosper within it, and be the good complacent little citizens that the powerful wanted them to be.

My father never went to college. He asked the big questions, and tried to live his life by the answers, but debt still got him in the end. It forced him into a life of monetary desperation, complacency, and crisis. For most of his life he had lived a life untethered to debt, he made enough money for the things he needed and prospered in the things he valued: music, art, crafts, history, politics, and all the enriching qualities of life. Then he had a family and tried to live out an American dream even he valued: owning his own home. For a good ten years he lived it out. Mortgage payments were reasonable, he and my mom had me and my sister. They raised us by the same values that they had lived by for so long, and together we had a beautiful life highlighted by intrinsic values.

In 2008, the neoliberal hammer of retributive justice swung down on him. It demanded remittance for a life lived outside of its grasp, and eventually my father paid the ultimate price. Neoliberalism operates on a dogma of lend, lend, lend, bail out the banks that are too big to fail, and keep the people in debt (Robert Reich, Inequality for all). This system keeps the masses subservient to a fear of poverty, with no time for a disgust for affluence (Herbert's hippopotamus). The system failed and the 2008 financial crisis ensued. Our mortgage rate increased 3 fold, and our world fell apart. My father had always lived a life of conviction against the system, and it resulted in his biggest shame- a feeling of inability to provide for those he loved. In response, he buckled down, worked longer and longer hours of construction, only to come home to toil in the backyard late into the night, growing as much cannabis as he could, but it still wasn't enough. The stress and guilt drove him mad, he convinced himself he had to do more. He started selling other less harmless substances. All my life he’d adamantly preached against the use and sale of all drugs except weed. He didn't even drink alcohol. But driven by the need to provide for his family, he convinced himself it was the only option to make ends meet. Coupled with stress and guilt, his selling quickly turned into usage. Our world unraveled, and he and everything he stood for crashed and burned. He fell to his addiction. He stopped providing for us or even himself. He got fired from all his jobs, crashed his cars, and sold all of his possessions that had defined him for so long as a man of qualitative values. His immense collection of books, musical instruments, jewelry he had made himself, tools, anything he had of any value, gone. I still think about all the amazing stuff he had collected and wish I had some of it to remember him by. In 2014 drug use took him away from this world forever. Six years after the 2008 crisis had started it all. He lived victoriously against the system for so long, it is easy to look at his end as a defeat. While it ended in tragedy, I think of all the lessons he left to me and my sister as his victory, an unbreakable legacy that I will pass on to my own children, and they will pass on to theirs.

My questions become: how do I live a life that is moral, intrinsically rich, and at the same time provide amply for those that I love? How do I live outside the system, without eventually being defeated by it? I have always felt a great calling towards things that have intrinsic value, pursuits that are done just for the sake of the joy they bring you. My parents always supported me in those pursuits as well. When I was younger it was skateboarding, so they just let me skate all day everyday. When I got older it was surfing. They gave me all the freedom they could to pursue that. It has and will continue to bring me to countless corners of the globe that I would never have gone to otherwise. Now it is still surfing, but it is also having meaningful connections with those I love, hiking, camping, exploring, cooking, learning, and challenging myself in new ways, and innumerable undefinable other qualities.

In the past I felt guilty or lazy for not wanting to get a practical degree and secure a job where I could work nine to five behind a desk for the rest of my life. I felt dumb for exploring the humanities and choosing Political Science as my major, not knowing what career it may offer. Now I see it's the system and the things that it values that made me feel that way. The system doesn't value qualities that bring about a meaningful life. It values a way of life that leaves people alienated from their environment, void of meaningful connections, depressed and empty. It values those things because its designers have realized that's how they stay powerful. Those who live outside of it become a threat. If you are not careful it will push back at you and drown you in its vices. I'm not sure what I am going to do or how I am going to do it. I too would like to own my own piece of land someday, and I'm not afraid to work hard to get what I want. But if I played by the rules of the neoliberal system to get it, I would sacrifice so much of who I am and what I value. Maybe I'll cruise around enjoying myself, working odd jobs to make ends meet, surfing whenever I can, or maybe I'll figure it out and create the life I dream of, either way I'll be flourishing. Whatever I do, I want to live life passionately. As long as I am passionate about the way I am living I know I'll be happy and satisfied. I no longer feel guilty or lazy for not wanting to comply with the system. I know my rejection of it is powerful. I strive to embody the principles my parents taught me, and to reject the system wherever I see necessary. I feel empowered by choosing to live the life that I want.