Everybody's Dancin' in a Ring Around the Sun...

People formed new families, out of thin air, in search of warmth and feeling that was absent in the straight world.

Early on, there was the 'Woodstock Nation', and then the million spin-offs that followed, most forming around bands, or styles of band. (more importantly, music - the driving force) Tens or hundreds of thousands of people together, dancing to the same rhythm, sharing libations, being taken through journeys of musical emotions and thought, large group catharsis-- this is ritual, it is spiritual. Just because it also happens to be fun doesn't invalidate its deeper implications. The notion that spirituality must be grim, and uninspired, is an artifact of corporate religion.

To this day it continues, people identifying each other's affiliation by subtle (or not so subtle) clues in hair, dress, speech, accessories.

This tribalization is natural, and Pagan in flavor. It is in basic opposition of establishment stricture, and is another example of the conflict between synthetic and organic.

The media-advertising demon took hold of it in a big way for a long time, from 'The Pepsi Generation' to imitation psychedelic soft-drink ads. This constant co-opting and commercialization still goes on, any new ripple is encapsulated, named, on the cover of TIME--and then forgotten, trivialized. It has been packaged and resold, had the life sucked out of it in the minds of the people who put spiritual stock in it.

Fortunately the new counter-culture has devised ways to evade the advertiser's con, adopting styles intentionally repugnant to the status-quo, from mohawks to pierced tongues, good soulful flamboyance, and impossible to sell in a mall. The Internet also promises to be too mercurial and cyborganic for them to get a grip on. Center everywhere and circumference nowhere.