Smoke Trails #4 The Farm There are lots of Israeli kibbutzim that surpassed the 1000-member mark, but only one of its kind ever existed in the USA, and that is the intentional community that is known as "The Farm" in central Tennessee. Although it only peaked briefly at that figure, and has since dropped to only 200 members, for that reason and many more it justifies an in-depth investigation into its colourful history. Some of these details are excerpted from a compendium of recollections by past and present members, published as Voices From the Farm. Others are as recalled to me by old-timer Peter Schweitzer, one of the original members who still lives there today. Thousands of young Americans flocked to San Francisco at the end of the 1960's to be a part of what many of them felt would become a new socio-cultural paradigm. A university professor who had converted to hippiedom began to hold court to hundreds of youth every Monday night, lecturing about life in the language of the times. Christian religious leaders all over the country wanted to know what this new movement was all about, and they found in S.G. someone who could also answer their questions. So they invited him to visit their parishes across the continent, which he promptly did, with scores of schoolbuses and the hundreds of hippies in tow. This part is little-known: when they crossed the California-Oregon border, tipped-off cops busted them for marijuana possession. In the defendant's docket, S.G. explained that they meant no harm; that in fact, they were on a mission to save the world! The judge must also have been impressed by his oratory skills, because he released the entire caravan on the condition that they go off and fulfill their planetary mandate, as promised. And so they continued to criss-cross the country, spreading the good word of the spiritual revolution at hand to unsuspecting suburbanites and hicksters that hadnÕt a clue. But when they returned to San Francisco, it was anti-climactic; after living and loving each other on the road for so long, they couldn't imagine picking up where they'd left off, paying rent for apartments. They wanted to practice what they were preaching, prove that it was in fact possible to live with each other in peace by cooperating instead of competing. So they found cheap land in rural Tennessee and drove out there en masse, turned their vehicles into permanent shelters, and got down to the hard work of learning how to be real farmers. Contrary to what you might imagine, family values on the Farm were quite traditional, and that surely paved the way towards integration with their neighbours, the native Tennesseeans. They called their creed "Psychedelic Amish": If you were having sex, you were engaged; if you got pregnant, you were married! Marijuana was smoked freely and LSD was taken as sacrament; they started up a local rock radio station and their hardcore house band toured from state to state; but they werenÕt having any of this polyamory stuff, there was significant social pressure for men to quickly settle down with one woman. In a decade they succeeded in starting up a whole host of cottage industries that went along with their conscious lifestyle: tofu-making factories, solar panel manufacturing, midwifery services, and a publishing company that promoted their ideas abroad. They shared what they had with interested others, no matter how challenging, taking in dozens of visitors every day that streamed in from all over the globe. More than this, they went colonial, starting up satellite communities in several other states, growing crops that flourished in different climactic conditions, and maintaining a constant flow of supplies back and forth to and from home base. Riding waves of success, they remembered their commitment to that judge back in Grant's Pass, Oregon to increase the peace. So they established Plenty, a non-profit charity organization that flew crews of Farm members to wherever catastrophic poverty reared its ugly head. From establishing regional food banks in their own backyard, all the way down to Guatemala to organize hurricane relief, and all the way up to New York City running ambulance teams in the Bronx, The Farm took their Tikun Olam very seriously. You could say it was their very raison d'etre, their reason for being. So what went wrong in this idyllic commune? By the early 1980's, the whole country was in a recession, and so was the Farm. In their colossal efforts to fix every problem they encountered, they let the home fires go out. They stretched themselves far too thin, and the web holding it all together fell apart at the seams. They sacrificed their own standards of living for far too long, and shut down any internal voices of dissent, until socialism turned sour. Today, we would identify these symptoms as activist burnout syndrome on a community level. But back then, it wasn't recognized and dealt with in time, until it was far too late to do anything about. In order to deal with their crushing debts, they privatized all assets, abandoning their communist model for good. In retrospect, it's incredible to imagine that a highly motivated group of young people could have accomplished so much good work in so little time, and then seemingly just as quickly collapse into capitalism. Today, the former Farm members are processing their pain and coming to terms with their experimental decade, and hopefully resolving their feelings for each other. And for the next generation of wanna-be do-gooders, I hope that we can learn our lessons from the Farm: This exponential octopus went way past its natural limits, and its hierarchical exoskeleton wasnÕt flexible enough to shape-shift into more autonomous pods. But may we be inspired by Plenty, who proved that we can change the world, if we live our dreams.