SERIOUS GRAVITY (A SANITY PRIMER)

I maintain that Freud was right about us in one respect - that whatever our professed opinions might be on the surface - there is always a hidden current of thought and feeling that flows in a different direction... full of messy, inappropriate, hostile, aggressive, irascible impulses - directed outward at various outside sources of irritation and aversion. These repressed "sentiments" (I hate x, y, z...) have a way of inserting themselves into our daily train of thought,  trickling into our speech patterns, making for unexpected gaffes, over-reactions, out-of-kilter behaviors, white-lies,  double-standards... making us feel for lack of a better word, conflicted - at least on the inside, ambivalent , more susceptible to insensitivity than our otherwise liberal-progressive consciences would care to admit.....to acknowledge to this sub-current of aggression hiding in the shadows doesn't mean that our conscious opinions (of peace, love, cooperation, tolerance, urbanity, ...

When the mood comes upon you, it takes you there to that place and you see whatever you see through that lens... Think of the scene that emerges sleepily or sanguinely, with irritation, laughter, sadness, surprise or from anger...always some agenda lurking in the background...People, places, things, creatures either doing what we need them to do or not - getting in our way, making us react.. I often imagine a way of simply "being there" without any particular mood attached- sitting there,  part of the scene,  watching paint dry, watching the corn grow as it were, people-watching, not even staring, taking in all the commotion, the daily activity without hint of passing judgment...a neutral observer ....Would I lose all interest at that moment...or would another form of curiosity kick in?

What year did everything change...? When did the floodgates open? What were the changes exactly? Changes in attitude, changes in culture...,forbidden topics no longer forbidden, a shift in manners and morals... Was it because of JFK's death and the aftermath of that or before? A reaction to the cold war, the atom bomb, the H-bomb? the anxiety that was the 1950s? People gradually speaking more openly, candidly, cursing in public, reading Freud, Kinsey, Kerouac, wearing their hair longer (men) or shorter (women)? Indulging, unwinding, breaking loose from convention, rebelling against parents (the older crowd),  shedding inhibitions, breaking molds, getting rid of  hang-ups, a post-war middle-class sampling bohemian trends seeping downward from the upper classes or upward from the working classes...Was it a seed planted by the dream factory of Hollywood, a subliminal advertising ploy, the power of suggestion, collective hypnosis, mass media? Was it from articles in Cosmopolitan a...