People of the Rainbow: A Nomadic Utopia

Epilogue 1: A Global Movement Faces a Changing World

Epilogue 1 A Global Movement Faces a Changing World The years since publication of the first edition of People of the Rainbow have proven tumultuous for “Babylon.” The movement for global economic justice came of age in Seattle and London in 1999, with the “Battle in Seattle” becoming a new generation’s Woodstock. George W. Bush came and went, but the wars that commenced under his administration live on. The attacks of September 11, 2001, so changed the global zeitgeist that we now demark history as being “pre-” or “post 9–11.” Global warming is now a universally accepted reality—except in the United States. Violent police riots against demonstrators in the United States are so commonplace as to not be newsworthy. Prominent American and European media personalities and politicians call for and defend ethnic profiling. Americans now need passports to visit Canada and Mexico. Terms like “preemptive war” and “indefinite detention without trial” easily roll off presidential tongues. Even NBC News reports that the Pentagon spies on American peace activists, going as far as to list a Quaker meeting as a national security threat (Myers et al. 2005). Against this backdrop, the Rainbow Family continues to exercise its right to hold Gatherings celebrating free speech and the right to assemble—rights other Americans seem comfortable to abdicate. The Rainbow Family is holding on to key libertarian values and resisting the changes and accommodations associated with acquiescence to an increasingly intrusive state. The fact that Rainbows still gather, liberate time and space, and still manage to create a Temporary Autonomous Zone is testimony to the Family’s resistance to destructive change. The Rainbow Family, however, is anything but static. It is not the anachronism the American media has, for four decades, painted it to be. Like the larger mainstream culture that spawned it, the Family has also always been in transition , adjusting to and sometimes reflecting ongoing global cultural trends. Rainbow values have remained a constant even while Rainbow culture continues to evolve. This chapter examines both how the Family has changed and resisted change since the first edition of People of the Rainbow appeared in 1997. Globalization The Rainbow Family, from its first Gathering in 1972, was firmly rooted in the United States counterculture that birthed it, shaped it, and nurtured 218 • Epilogue 1 it during its formative years. Gatherings were exclusively an American phenomenon during the Family’s first decade, drawing visitors from across the globe. Chapter two chronicles the 1983 birth of European Rainbow Gatherings, when a group of Swiss Rainbows, schooled at American Gatherings, organized a European variant across the border from Switzerland in the Italian Alps. An emergent European Rainbow Family has hosted annual Gatherings ever since, alternating locations across Western and Eastern Europe, including Scandinavia , Russia, and the British Isles. Smaller regional Gatherings, also based on the American template, began to coalesce globally in the 1980s and 1990s in, for example, Canada, Mexico, Australia, South and Central America, Asia, South Africa, Israel, and Australia. In 1996, a group of Rainbows from around the world hosted a “World Gathering” in Australia, followed by annual World Gatherings in, for example, Zimbabwe, Brazil, Costa Rica, Turkey, Thailand, China, and New Zealand. The World Gatherings are smaller than the National Gatherings in the United States, seldom drawing more than a few hundred participants, but their impact is great as they bring Rainbow culture to far-flung parts of the planet. Today’s Rainbow Family includes faces such as that of Ron Fogel, an Israeli ethnographer who completed graduate study in New Zealand as a participant ethnographer at a Rainbow Family–related community in Australia. Fogel first encountered the Rainbow Family while traveling in South Asia in 1996–97. He subsequently attended Gatherings in Israel, England, India, Australia, and New Zealand, before commencing fieldwork in Australia in 2007. Fogel, who wields credentials both as a Rainbow and a scholar of Rainbow Family culture, however, has never attended an American Gathering (Fogel 2009, 1). His experience typifies that of global Rainbow participants who no longer see the American Gatherings as their Mecca. A global Rainbow Family independent of its American origins is now thriving. During the period of this global proliferation of the Family, however, American Gatherings have been shrinking, with attendance at National Gatherings now running from around seven thousand to an infrequent maximum of fifteen thousand participants, and with regional Gatherings becoming both smaller and less frequent. The Rainbow Family as a distinct culture, and not just a...