This is from Memoirs of a Drugged-Up, Sex-Crazed Yippie, By Steve Otto;
When I returned to
had vowed that I would never get into any business that
required me to kill someone to protect my investment.
Those days were over.
About a month later I was still seeing Pauline off and
on. We never had a tight relationship, but we kept seeing
each other. One night we were sitting together on her
black leather couch, covered with afghans. She also had a
brown leather chair, a Zenith TV and a Sony stereo system
in the corner. We had just made love and were now just
cuddling on her couch. The room was dark and she had the
radio on. The brightest thing in the whole room was the
yellow numbers on the stereo. Then suddenly I heard some
shocking news on the radio:
“John Lennon has just been shot. He has been
pronounced dead. A man shot him in front of his home and
was taken away by police. He was smiling.”
Like much of
grew up with the Beatles. We were the “youth culture.”
This seemed to be a wake up call that we were mortal.
Our youth would not last forever. We would all grow old
and die. To some, as with me, Lennon was an inspiration. I
often identified with his lyrics. His song “Imagine” became
an anthem from that day on. It represented the idealism
we strived for in both the 1960s and 1970s. We wanted
a peaceful world, void of nationalism, commercialism,
materialism and religious violence. That dream was about to
become a distant memory, almost unthinkable, in the 1980s.
The Reagan era was about to bring the exact opposite, a
country of greed, self-centeredness, arrogance and mean
spiritedness. It was as if Lennon’s death and Reagan’s
election victory were symbolic of the end of an era. It had
been an era Lennon helped shape.
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