Peace, Love, and... Drugs?

By Elyssa Buhl

As I was looking through old pictures and sifting through ideas of what my history amounts to, I seemed to find a few themes: music, family, hippie, and travel. What stuck out to me, however, was the prevalence of photos which depicted "happy" moments and smiling faces. Very rarely were there photos of the horrible times, which I concluded realistically as probably due to the fact that if something's going terribly, there probably isn't time to take photos because everyone's trying to fix it. However, it led me to think about how our history in photographs typically paints a much different picture from what really happens. Although it does usually account for the rough times, pictures taken at funerals, and possibly also the bumps and bruises acquired in that first bike accident as a kid, the photos mostly describe a story unlike reality. Of course, there is truth in the happiness and smiling faces of the photos, but there are so many gaps between the clicks of the camera. I don't think this is altogether a bad thing, but when it comes to history, it can portray a different message from reality, and is an incarnate example of what James Loewen describes to us in "The American Pageant" in his conclusion that history is ideological. This principle is also displayed in Maus, however in a different manner; Spiegelman involves "pictures" of the way his emotions remembered and shaped his father's history. However, the picture of his father in the prison uniform, is another great example of this "faux" history; his father is smiling in the very uniform that symbolized a horrific memory.


My "Favorites" as a child:

Betty Boop Cartoon (1930's)

H.R. PufNStuf (aired 1969-1972)
This show has a very "hippie" mentality
and involves lots of tree hugging,
song-singing, and drugged up
characters

This is a recent photo, but my dad (left), friend (middle),
and dad's brother (right): My dad and his brothers
were in a heavy metal band called "The Lugnuts"
when they were younger

Miss Suzy children's book (1964)

As for my past, I've realized that there's a lot behind the pictures and a lot being said outside the frame of the photo.  My parents both came from religious homes that caused them to turn away from any idea about God, they were suppressed as teenagers and rebelled into the "love" era. My dad was a rocker musician, and my mom was a hot, fashionable, "hippie." After my parents got married, they grew back into their roots in a new way and became "born-again" Christians. This means that they gave their life to Jesus and it changed their life around; love was still their focus, but they now had a moral code that they adhered to, out of that love. And from that, I grew up not knowing about their "crazy" past. In my reality, my parents were just normal mom and dad, nothing too out of the ordinary; I didn't know who my parents were before they created our family. That being said, I had a lot of my childhood "favorites" and background either related to the hippie era of the '60s-'70s, or before that. A few examples of this: my first and favorite book was Miss Suzy (written in 1964), one of my mom's favorite show we would watch was HR PufNStuf (which aired from 1969-1972), my favorite cartoon was Betty Boop, my favorite music included the Beatles and Billie Holiday, and one of my favorite movies was Miracle. These all were influences of my parents, I wouldn't have found any of them otherwise. And although these are all laced with ideals from that time period, I was given the impression that my parents were never involved in that lifestyle. I was given a "Boy Scout handbook" version of life and I'm actually glad my parents waited to reveal the reality of their past more and more as I grew up and could better understand. These medias and "favorites" of mine painted a picture of a peace, happiness, love, and community. They created an ideological history, involving more propaganda (HR PufNStuf), than reality and truth. As I grew up, I learned stories about how my dad did heavy drugs and my mom lived out of cars and old abandoned houses, about how there was so much religious oppression from their parents, which led them into lifestyles of rebellion and ultimately depression and anger. The sexual revolution was huge in that time period, and although "love is all you need", love became a synonym of sex, which is so twisted. My parents, together, stepped out of the popular hippie lifestyle and because of that, my life was affected.

My dad quit using drugs after his friend died from an overdose, which caused me to personally never desire to do drugs. My mom never really had a childhood and because of that, she's still a kid at heart, which also affected me. Overall, the era that they grew up in and the decisions they made, affected my childhood and growth into adulthood. I didn't agreed with their rules when I was younger and thought they were too strict as parents. They laid down the law, and I thought they knew nothing about life; I thought they were all about unfair, stupid rules. I was given the "because I told you to" and the, "no, you absolutely can't have a boyfriend until you're old", and the, "no drugs, no drinking." They were able to teach me how to skip out on some of the mistakes they made, even if it was against my will and what I thought to be my own "better judgement." And as I'm older, they no longer give me the fluffy Boy Scout Handbook version and I also know the history written outside the margins of the American Pageant history textbook, in relation to their lives. There are always two sides to the story and as I was a child, those "favorites" depicted one picture of the hippie era, but as I've grown older, the other side of the photograph has been revealed as well - painting a whole story.