I rode the ancient schoolbus that passed for an underground transport. The price of the ticket had been exorbitant because the seller sensed my desperate circumstances. He asked no questions but obviously jacked up the price to cover "certain risk factors." The back of the bus contained shelves where riders could stretch out sleeping bags.

           I had neglected to bring mine so I scrunched on the hard bench seat and tried to sleep with my coat covering my legs. The mountain pass we traversed was not snowbound but skiffs of snow littered the ground and the temperature spiked below freezing.

           Most of the crew were aging hippies and young drifters cut loose from colleges and family. Altogether, they were a gregarious bunch, but I withdrew from any offers of company.

           My fears of discovery and feelings of guilt absorbed me and made me appear so much more the fugitive -- though I didn't realize that this was so.

           As I tried to sleep in the afternoon grayed by low, heavy clouds, I started with the realization that I had not left word for Raylene or the collectors that I was fleeing.

           The guy on the other end won't know I'm coming, I thought with alarm.

           I cast about in my mind for a way to remedy the situation. The signal had been a letter drop -- had it been a phone call, I could have used the next payphone. But there was no help for it. Adrenaline tensed my body.

           What would I do once in Arizona? every nerve seemed to ask repeatedly.

           On my second day on the road, I snagged a copy of the Seattle paper. In the Local section, a blurb noted my disappearance. There was a hint that I might be sick or "disoriented." The picture was a bad one taken by the paper when I was minus a few pounds and plus some of my hair but the general appearance was close enough for recognition.

           Two pages later, apparently unrelated, there was an article that noted the mugging death of a psychological counselor named Ridley Daves in an alleyway in an old part of town. I tried to imagine what they were up to -- not even quite sure who the "they" were.

           Trask? Absolutely! The police? Probably. The brass at the paper? Likely. Just what is their game? I wondered. But I was not up for much deductive reasoning. My mind was crowded with other things.

           My false identity as Aaron White would stand fairly close scrutiny but it would be caught by any truly professional inspection. I knew there was probably a manhunt going on and that police agencies would be searching for someone about my age and build. Their search would be aided by the story in the paper whose readers would no doubt be anxious to help. I had to maintain a low profile.

           My only hope was that Raylene or the other collectors would see the story in the paper and make the connection that I was headed for the underground. Perhaps they would take it upon themselves to pass the word to the man in Phoenix. On this issue, I could only wait. I passed the rest of the afternoon restlessly nodding and waking in turn. A couple behind me played grating tunes on their disk player while they fondled one another under a blanket as if they were in a private suite. Finally, I rose and found an unoccupied platform in the vehicle, and spread out upon it with my tote bag as my pillow.

           "Like to borrow a sleeping bag, mister," a small feminine voice came after I had fruitlessly tossed for a comfortable position for several minutes. "We have an extra."

           The girl couldn't have been more than 16-years-old. The young man looked to be about 20 -- maybe more. They were sitting on the bottom platform across the bus from me. Beneath them there was a bedroll spread out and a sleeping bag rolled up at one end.

           I was becoming desperate for sleep.

           "You sure you won't need it?" I croaked.

           "Not till we get to Phoenix," she answered. "That's where we get off."

           "Me too," I said. "And I would be most grateful for the use of that bag."

           It took only moments to drop off once I had the small comfort of the bag under me to soften the bed.

           When I awoke at midnight, the stale, sweet odor of marijuana hung heavily in the air. I looked around and everyone save the driver and an old hippie were asleep. Outside the terrain could not be discovered. The dimly lighted grayness of the highway and stark glare of a highway sign were the only things to be seen. The old hippie was conversing in a low voice with the driver. It seemed to be a metaphysical conversation as the words "ethereal" and "consciousness" seemed to play a major role.

           Lacking any other diversion, I strained to listen.

           ". . . like a cosmic scale of justice," the hippie ended his thought.

           The driver glanced over at the long-haired man. "You really think there's justice in the universe?"

           "Yeah, man. It's like karma or something. What goes around, comes around, you know!"

           "I dunno," the driver continued. "I mean, where did this 'karma' come from? Did it just happen as part of the Big Bang or evolution? Where did 'justice' evolve from? And is 'justice' an earmark of the next stage of evolution? It seems to me that the unjust -- the oppressors -- are the winners in this world and natural selection always chooses the strongest to survive."

           "Wow, that's heavy, man," the hippie responded. "I never thought of that before. What a flash!"

           Listening to the conversation was like entering a time machine and going back to the 1960s. It was the kind of philosophy everyone had been talking about then. The old hippie even retained some of the vernacular.

           The driver spoke again. "The way I figure it, 'justice' is what's right for me and what I can get away with. After all, if I'm just a part of a Big Bang, cooled into a planet, given life by a chance mixture of chemicals, made human by a series of successful mutations, and placed at the top of the heap by having inherited superior qualities, then where is the place for 'karma' or 'justice' unless they are just scare tactics to keep the lesser men in their place?"

           "Sounds pretty cold, man," the hippie replied."Yeah, it is cold. But then, so is the universe."

           The hippie appeared to think it over for a few minutes. The bus hummed along the highway as if bearing full speed down a tunnel.

           After a time, the hippie ran his fingers through his hair, looked at the driver and asked, "But don't you think there is any limit on that kind of philosophy? Like, it's one thing to do your own thing, but that's gotta be done without busting up somebody else's thing, right?"

           "I don't know why," the driver answered. "There are no absolutes of right and wrong, right? Each person decides what's right for them, right?"

           The hippie nodded and the driver went on. "Then what makes it so-called 'wrong' to mess up your 'thing' -- maybe that's my thing."

           "But we have to draw a line somewhere, don't we?" the hippie asked in surprise.

           "What? And establish absolutes again? There aren't any. And even if we agreed to arbitrarily make some, who decides what they are? You? Me? The government? Well, I'll tell you who, it's the strong -- the ones that evolution favors anyway. And guess what? The rules have never applied to them at all."

           "Yeah, but their karma will get them," the hippie assured.

           "Oh, really? Got any evidence of that? Seems to me a lot of these guys get off scot free and there's no evidence that they get reincarnated -- they're just dead."

           The old hippie said nothing. He knew his arguments were no match for the driver's conclusions but he did not know why. The conversation was frightening. The driver's words did not bother me so much as the old hippie's inability to respond to the challenge. But it was not simple ignorance. Both actually operated under the same philosophy -- do your own thing -- only the driver was more honest about the consequences of his beliefs. People like him were rare -- fortunately. But the fact that a broad spectrum of people held the same nihilistic belief and still regarded themselves as basically good people was terrifying. The thought of three hundred fifty million Americans each "doing their own thing" -- and with no one allowed to believe in absolutes, much less try to impose them -- was a fearful awakening.

Ideas and Consequences            With a primarily uneducated populace -- or at least one with a stunted education -- it was much simpler to find a home for philosophies that would have been immediately dismantled by critical thinking. People became used to thinking with their glands. If an idea was presented in a way that evoked good feelings, it was accepted. It was simpler to sell the vacuous Desiderata with its "Go placidly among the noise and haste. . ." than to accept the thundering of "Thou shalt not. . ." from Moses on Mt. Sinai.
           In the same way that advertising products was perverted from a display of actual quality to making the consumer feel good about the product, ideas were also marketed. Serious discourse on important issues came down to who had the best feelings attached to their side of the issue. Often times the remnant of those better trained in debate were unprepared for audiences who would not respond to rational, logical debate and facts. They would simply stare at the debater uncomprehendingly. Thus, the advantage went to the sloganeer who best understood the mental temper of the times.
           The consequences of the ideas accepted by the popular mind became quickly apparent.
           The overarching belief of late 20th century Americans could be summed up as, Do your own thing. It was variously stated as:
           Different strokes for different folks.
           Each person must decide what is right for them.
           There are no absolutes.
           Right and wrong are situational.

           It did not matter if the people actually understood that this was what they believed, the results were the same -- chaos. In the midst of this was a nearly universal acceptance of the maxim, "Your right to do your thing ends where it interferes with my right to do mine."
           No one, however was quite willing to draw any line on where that interference began. Since no one would draw any lines, the nation was left with hundreds of millions of free moral agents each trying to do their own thing heedless of others doing the same.
           Another comfortable idea that gained ascendancy was that there were no "bad" people. This soon flowered into the idea that there were no bad acts, merely responses to bad parents, bad experiences, bad genes, bad memories, or some other stimuli. With this, people could feel good about the wrong they did since they were just "acting out" on some unfortunate past incident -- it was all so easy to understand why people did wrong when they were seen as helpless pawns of their fates.

Individuality v Society             One of the immediate results of autonomy of moral values being taught in 20th century America was the inordinate emphasis on the individual over the responsibility to others. Individuality is a cherished Western concept but in former times had been carefully blended with duty to one's fellow man.
           Thus, in revolutionary times, the Framers of the U.S. Constitution were not afraid to assert freedom of speech because all were in general agreement that this freedom was within certain bounds -- and that those bounds were respective of men's responsibilities towards others. There was a moral consensus.
           George Washington and others pointed out that freedom without self-restraint would be chaos -- and thus it has been fulfilled in the modern age where the freedom itself has become the highest virtue. Man's inborn perversity and abilities for self-deception had led him to imagine that freedom means having no restraint whatsoever. Yet, man's greatest periods of progress have all been times when ideas were free and actions were dictated by self-control.
           The idea that a person is only responsible for himself (and not even that, when in therapy) for his "values," led to a societal carelessness about how others were affected by the exercise of various freedoms. Women and children were degraded into objects of pleasure in pornography. "Chronic users of medical services" were ignored to death. Parents were allowed to abandon their children and each other in "no fault" divorce. Even auto insurance assigned no blame for accidents.Immersing myself in my assigned writing project, helped me begin to appreciate the need for the interdependence of the community. The balancing act in the community was precarious.

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