A Meal For Everyone in the World

I, like most, view hippies as benevolent crackpots who are trying to achieve a visionary, yet unrealistic utopian society with free love and cheap drugs, where chilling out together solves everyone’s cares. To be honest, that vision sounds pretty appealing, especially in a society dominated by corporatism, political games, consumption, mistrust, war, etc., not to sound too apocalyptic. I dream, so I participate in small, trendy ways, wearing peace pins, shopping at thrift stores, grooving to ethnic music, and imagining moving to a commune when climate change frees up land in unsettled areas.

However, my eternal pragmatic side halts me and warns that setting myself free from society isn’t the most productive path to follow. The little voice tells me that I can make more of a difference by changing the system from the inside, educating myself about the loopholes so that I can infiltrate, maintain my values, and become a Robin Hood type. Striving to truly do what I believe is right by doing no harm to others is an effort, not an end. Fully achieving that end is impossible.

So I try. I recently decided to volunteer at the Little Grill, after thinking about going every Monday since the start of the year, and every Monday, deciding against it. With little thought, I walked into, to use the word so well linked to EMU, a community. When my Food Colloquium class gardened at Our Community Place the week before, we listened to Ron Copeland, the former owner of the Little Grill, give a brief description of the Collective and the community meal that is, in his words, a free meal for everyone in the world.

I hadn’t expected such a well thought-out reply. I always thought that the Little Grill was a haphazard community, assembled around the common idea of eating together, but I hadn’t guessed the foresight behind it, the intentional philosophy that glued it together. At the meal, everyone is on equal ground. Black, White, Hispanic, homeless, well-off, young, old, student, jobless: we serve each other. There is no space to be shy or particular. You jump in and give what you have, and there is more than enough. Somehow, it works. It isn’t intended to be socialist or anarchist, though there is no profit made or hierarchy present. It isn’t charity, thus isn’t rejected as such. It is simply the risky effort of one man, embraced and encouraged by a multitude.

These folks haven’t asked permission. They’ve taken an idea, a dream, and decided to make it more than an effort. They’ve dared to step entirely out of society’s path and object, firmly. And they have been richly rewarded.

Why can’t we make that step? Who denies us the right to take a risk? Who can say if it won’t work? Utter failure is always a possibility, but so is success, and aren’t the odds the same?

Watching Barack Obama’s recent speech on race relations furthers my train of thought. He wonders why we are obstructed by the concept of race on the way to solving the problems that grasp at all of us. Many issues don’t exclusively victimize a group, and even if they appear to, we are all connected anyway. Obama challenges us to ask why we aren’t able to see past unchangeable human characteristics like skin color to actually address the underlying issues that we can change. We get hung up so easily on the details, and forget to look deeper, to the roots of our animosity, that we so easily label and dismiss as another’s fault.

Here is when I begin to think that hippies are on the right track. If we all just stopped doing harm, even in the slightest ways, if we all decided that our community was everyone in the world, if we ceased to label and divide ourselves, if we said to hell with the system and did things our own way—what? What are we so afraid of? Now I have both inspiration to look to the root and tangible hope that change can be made. All I need is encouragement, and for that, I have a community.