MLF-956B

PETER YARROW - TALKS ABOUT " TRADITIONS ' IN PEOPLE'S LIVES AS A RICHNESS OF CULTURE -
Peter Yarrow 00:32
Right, right, right right. The idea is that, again, tradition, as it legitimately exists in families to note the goings and comings of lives and fortunes and tragedies and murders and, and trains and, you know, ships and poems that that is, it's all richness of culture. But when people adopt a perspective that engages in a kind of insistence upon a value system that is destructive, that is insensitive, that is uncaring, that is small minded, then you're not talking about a tradition, then you're talking about a socio pathology in a culture.

Peter Yarrow 01:56
That tradition of the kind of belief systems of the Neocons is not a tradition? This is a socio pathology. The tradition of this thinking of parents who hated Blacks or Jews is not a tradition. It is a sociopathology, that needs to be challenged. Traditions, as we're talking about them, that recognize in a people's way, in a grassroots way,
the things that legitimately happen to us. Those inevitably bring out the best in us. The time of a birth, see, seems to allow people to celebrate what's decent in them. Christmas seems to bring out more decency, rather than prejudice, although not categorically but to a large degree. But any doctrinal, any doctrine, but any doctrine that emerges from a culture that becomes a way of pushing away other traditions or other people is to me a spiritual misstep, a piece of building a sociopathology and a tradition of negativism.

Peter Yarrow 04:51
Particularly you'll see it in academic institutions, where new ideas are repressed are suppressed. and not recognized. And it happens in medicine, it happens. That is the nature of the beast. But when you have a period of time, and when, when in which enormous changes must take place, because the emperor has no clothes, then you see that the dynamic between those who would hold it back, whether they're parents, or whether they're people who are stuck with a set of premises, that would forbid that progress, you will see real action and you will see a real conflict.

There were people in those days, who would literally get furious when they'd see long hair, they just would, because for them, it was symbolic of something that they feared it as they identified it as a drug culture or something that would turn over what they believed in that because cognitive dissonance, which is the theory of cognitive dissidence says that if something is going to contradict what you truly believe in, you're gonna hang on to that belief.

INTERVIEW ENDS

Peter Yarrow performs Bob Dylan cover.

Reel end.