Being alternative is not something I chose. I am a product of my times (the Sixties). Sometimes I wish I liked fast-food restaurants, action movies, reality television, \u201clite\u201d beer, church on Sunday, Red Sox baseball (okay, I love Red Sox baseball!) But growing up in the Sixties, I ended up a vegetarian, foreign-film watching, craft-beer loving ultra-liberal.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It hasn\u2019t made my life easier, I can tell you that.\u00a0 Sometimes I fall victim to the sin of vanity, thinking that I am somehow better than others because my lifestyle choices are eccentric or not mainstream. But in my heart I know that\u2019s not true.\u00a0 I\u2019m not an elitist, I\u2019m just different.\u00a0 I\u2019m not more evolved, I just evolved differently, into a person who is sometimes uncomfortable at social gatherings because I feel like I don\u2019t fit in.<\/p>\n
But isn\u2019t what\u2019s happening in America these days a kind of fragmentation, where everybody<\/em> is alternative in some way or another?\u00a0 Our demographic is no longer white, Protestant, Anglo Saxon.\u00a0 Less than 50% of the people in the country are Caucasian now. If you go to California, you see a truly diverse population that is a glimpse of the future of the rest of the country, with Hispanic, Asian, and other minorities now making up the majority. Fewer and fewer of us attend a traditional church. Almost everyone eats a wide variety of ethnic food from Mexican to Japanese. Cable television offers an amazingly vast array of viewing choices that cater to smaller and smaller segments of the populace. Gone are the days when three networks dominated the ratings. Now, for example, you can watch a show about people opening storage lockers, running pawn shops, or operating towing companies for a living!<\/p>\n These days I meet lots of supposedly blue-collar young men and women who are into all kinds of interesting, formerly \u201calternative\u201d offerings. Our plumber plays chess and goes curling. I have a farmer friend who is into the writings of Rudolf Steiner on \u201cbio-dynamics\u201d.\u00a0 The young woman at the market likes the Yankees, but she also cooks Thai food and wants to start her own company and be CEO.<\/p>\n And here at HNE I meet people who have all kinds of diverse and interesting\u00a0 outside interests, everything from hand-bell ringing to making handcrafted jewelry to running in crazy \u201cTough Mudder\u201d obstacle course races.<\/p>\n Is this a good thing or a bad thing?\u00a0 I think it\u2019s great.\u00a0 Diversity means choice.\u00a0 Choice means stimulating variety. So here\u2019s my question\u2014what\u2019s alternative about you? And, in the words of Sixties icon Bob Dylan,\u00a0 \u201cHow does it feel, to be on your own<\/em>\u201d?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Being alternative is not something I chose. I am a product of my times (the Sixties). Sometimes I wish I liked fast-food restaurants, action movies, reality television, \u201clite\u201d beer, church on Sunday, Red Sox baseball (okay, I love Red Sox baseball!) But growing up in the Sixties, I ended up a vegetarian, foreign-film watching, craft-beer […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[15,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2064","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-goals-and-motivation","category-mind-body-and-spirit"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6ZZxW-xi","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/hnetalk.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2064","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/hnetalk.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/hnetalk.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hnetalk.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hnetalk.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2064"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/hnetalk.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2064\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/hnetalk.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2064"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hnetalk.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2064"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hnetalk.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2064"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}