PARTING SHOT

N ice tribe, huh?” said an aging flower child in a flaming yellow T-shirt. It was a beautiful day, as most days are in Snowmass, Colorado, and I was ad-miring a distant mountain peak when she spoke to me. I hadn’t heard a group of people called a “tribe” since the waning days of Woodstock Nation. From her nametag I learned that she was Crystal Paris, at least in this incarnation, and my nametag told her I was with the press. That brought another question, and I quote, I think: “I mean, like, your objectivity, you know, as a writer, does that like prevent you from being (sweeping, inclusive gesture), part of all this?”

Well, yes and no. By “all this” Crystal meant the first annual “Choices for the Future” symposium of the Windstar Foundation, the brainchild of singer John Denver and martial artist Thomas Crum. Though I never became “part” of Windstar in Crystal’s sense, I found much to admire there. Windstar is airily dedicated to “the creation of a more sustainable future… and the concept of doing more with less,” and there’s a solid foundation to these high-country sand castles. Denver has given much of his fortune and energy to Windstar’s many projects over the past decade; he was knocking on the doors of networks and charities, trying to alert the West to Africa’s famine, long before Live Aid became a cause celebre. It’s fashionable to dismiss Denver as a granola-munching Rocky Mountain Highness, but he could have kept his money like most of us do. And no doubt he’d have made a bundle more had he stayed away from “message” songs during the Me Decade of the Seventies.

Colorado, of course, is the place for dreams and visions. Lulled by rushing streams and pine-perfumed air, you can believe anything for a day or two. Aldous Huxley once noted that the temperate climes of England’s Lake District produced the Romantic nature poets Wordsworth and Coleridge, while countries like South America and Burma were still waiting for the artist who would spot a benevolent God behind the baking sun and swarming insects. No doubt the natural splendors of Snowmass helped to lure the more than 1,100 people who paid $425 each or $695 per couple to hear a panel of experts talk about world problems and their solutions. Besides the ordinary seekers of enlightenment, celebrities like Jim Hen-son, the Muppeteer, and actor Dennis Weaver were sprinkled through the crowd.

If there was a common theme sounded by this diverse group-the speakers included scientists, ex-astronauts, politicians, businessmen, and mystics-it was that the individual has the power to change the world. Political parties, schools, and churches came in for hard knocks; again and again we were reminded of the lone idealists, the Gandhis and Cousteaus and Kings. Jean-Michel Cousteau presented a film on his father’s life and explorations, reminding us that most advances in diving equipment and underwater photography are the work of one man, Jacques Cousteau. Another crusader, Wes Jackson of the Land Institute in Kansas, is creating new perennial crops that will not exhaust the land. I began to see what Crystal had meant when Jackson flashed a picture of his giant wild rye; I’ve never seen a plant applauded before. Later, hundreds danced in the aisles to Neil Diamond’s “Headed for the Future” as ushers passed out copies of the annual report of Farley Industries, a preface to a talk by Bill Farley, who built a conglomerate with $2 billion in annual sales by watching “the value line, not the bottom line.” When plants and annual reports draw cheers, something is happening here.

Farley’s companies stress wellness and employee decision-making, but some members of the audience grilled him about his company’s defense contracts. After several barbed questions, he asked whether anyone in the room was willing to shut down our national defense tomorrow. Perhaps thirty people shouted that they were ready. “Good luck,” Farley snapped.

The outburst symbolized a troubling strain of thought that ran through the symposium. For most of the participants, the power of the individual to change the world had no bounds. How to end the arms race? Get to know the Russian people. People are good, governments evil. Speakers as different as John Denver and media czar Ted Turner seemed certain that we could all join hands over the Iron Curtain and beat our swords into plowshares. “Top people” in the USSR and China, Turner said, have told him they would scrap their nukes overnight if we would follow suit.

Conservatives who brand these opinions as disloyal or anti-American miss the point: if anything, Denver, Turner, and the others are seeing the world through star-spangled glasses, certain that our democratic tradition can be exported anywhere. So history was shunted aside: in three days at Windstar, nobody mentioned Hungary or Poland or Afghanistan, Russia’s Vietnam. But no peace movement will bring the boys home from Afghanistan. The essential difference in our two systems-the people are leaders here, ciphers there-was lost in a saccharin cloud of sentiment.

“I believe we should listen to the children,” says a current pop song. That was another theme of Windstar: leave it to the kids. Denver and Crum presented a “State of the Planet” global game, played on a huge world map, to show the vast disparity between the wealthy and poor nations and the growing nuclear threat. Red chips representing nuclear bombs were cast like seeds until they covered the world. Then a group of children scurried onto the map, swept up the tokens of doom, and put them back in their box.

Child worship reached its zenith in the presentation by Jerry Jampolsky and Diane Cirincione, co-directors of Children as Teachers of Peace. CTP seeks to “bridge international friendships” by taking groups of American children to meet Russian and Chinese children. After informing us that she had been a Sioux maiden in a previous life, Ms. Cirincione led the audience in a prayer to the Great Spirit. We were urged to send a loving beam of light flowing out of our bodies, out of Snowmass, out of Colorado, to every living being on earth, especially the Russians. In the silent auditorium, it was hard to believe that Stalin and Mao and Gadhafi had once been children, poisoned arrows aimed at the heart of the future.