But the Bible taught that the first two rows along the edge of the road were dedicated to passing travelers who in those days of non-frozen or concentrated foods, could not possibly carry enough food for a very long journey, and probably didn’t have any actual money on their persons as they traveled.

These were cultural norms. Some may say that is naive and it was easier then, and there are more people now and times are harder. But two rows alongside the field of a giant complicated farm is virtually insignificant. There are huge quantities of food produced and harvested these days, but two rows could still be done without damage to the industry. It is merely that sharp practices have become “normal”, which is to say not right or acceptable, but done by so many people that the curve describing the frequency of that action is near the norm. — Excerpted from Rendered Infamous, by Stephen Gaskin.

Stephen standing by Caravan buses.

Three decades after first publication, we’ve published a revised and annotated edition of Caravan. The book follows me and the Caravan of 50 school buses flowing out of Monday Night Class, as we travel around the United States on a speaking tour arranged by preachers who wanted me to tell them what this hippy thing was all about.

This new edition adds background to the speaking engagements, by sharing the road stories, the scenes behind the scenes—cowboys and cops, birthings and poop, peyote tea and White House security guards. There are dozens of great photos.

Here’s an excerpt I hope you enjoy.

We’re pretty durable, and we need to bump up against the universe a little bit to find out where it’s at. Also we need to bump up against each other a little bit. We shouldn’t think that we’re so fragile that we can’t lean on each other a little bit and interact kind of heavy and still be friends.

Getting away from the small village idea has done a funny thing to the whole country, because in a small village, if a fellow turns up obnoxious one day he’s still going to be living there the next day, and he’s either going to have to straighten up or nobody’s going to talk to him anymore or something. He’s going to get cooled.

But here in the city you can get obnoxious and move to another neighborhood, and get obnoxious and move to another neighborhood … and people get the idea that if you’re going to have to come on heavy to somebody to make them straighten up that they might not like you anymore, and they might move, and you’d never see them again or something. But we should all think that we’re all good enough friends—we’re all kind of like cousins anyway, we’re all the same kind of monkey—that we can say, “Hey, man, how about it,” once in a while, and the other fellow isn’t necessarily going to say, “Well I’m going to go home.”

That’s another part of interacting, getting into that learning experience. We learn how we be by bumping against each other a little bit, and it’s a good deal all the way around to have a learning experience. We’ve really learned a lot on the road too. One thing I learned … I said in my book that the country was so corrupt that it was falling down, which is what it looks like from San Francisco. But it looks a lot solider out here. It looks a lot solider. It looks like these folks would be easier to make friends with than to do anything else.

Q: About compassion and politics … if you go mess up a draft board, is that being compassionate for one’s brother?

No, if you go in and tear up somebody’s thing it’s going to blow their mind and wreck their head, and that means that there’s one more wrecked head that we’ve got to pick up, because we aren’t going to be cool until we pick up all the wrecked heads, it doesn’t matter whose they are. We can’t be cool until we get everybody cool and sane. There’s no final enlightenment until everybody can get off. You can only go so far, and then you’ve got to stop and help everybody get off, and that means everybody. So it’s immoral to mess up folks’ heads—anybody’s. I try to leave everybody’s head a little better than I found it, it doesn’t matter who he be.

I will tell you the best way for your revolution to be successful: You have to run your revolution in such a way that you can win the love of an honest square.

People don’t hurt people that they know well, so just make yourself know everybody well and let them know you well. Be wide open. Don’t hide anything and don’t act like you’re superior to them a little bit or anything. Get right in there with them, and if you do that they’ll have compassion with you, and if they have compassion with you they can’t hurt you; they won’t want to, they won’t want to hurt anybody.

We make a lot of difference: There’s a string of hundreds and hundreds of cops halfway across this continent who are well-disposed toward the next long-hair they meet, because the last two hundred of them they met were a groove. And we’re going all the way around the country doing that—trying to get other folks to do it too, because if we can build enough individual human bonds of love and trust, we can raise the whole love-trust thing for the whole country and for the whole world, and it’s really necessary that it be done.