My wifes’ top five

My top five

202-224-3121 short version
for PSAs

Self Portrait (above): I practiced the drums six hours a day the summer I turned thirteen. When my sister grew up and had kids, she would not let them take up the drums. I’ve never figured out why.

What Inspired Me to Be a Musician

— and Activist

by Lloyd Ferris

BA, Research Methods in Social Science
MA, Social Psychology
BS, What I like to spread around

In my generation, called the baby boom, everybody wanted to be a rock star.  Some of us aspired to more doable goals, like saving the world from nuclear obliteration, or eliminating poverty from the face of the Earth.

I kinda wanted to do all three. This website is my humble attempt to do exactly that (why not have it all?) before I go join that great garage band in the sky. In the process, I want to glorify myself by telling my life story.

Let’s start in the middle. I went to High School in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960s — in the afterglow of the Summer of Love, at the height of the Vietnam War. All my friends were in the peace movement, and I wanted to be with them with all my heart and soul.

But my father kept inconveniently remembering that when Britain allowed Hitler to roll over Czechoslovakia in 1938, it only encouraged his aggression. That led to World War II as we now know it. Yeah, Dad was always quick to remind me of that. He was also quick to remind me that Stalin imprisoned and murdered millions of people in the name of communism, so he believed that communism anywhere, even in tiny Vietnam, must be resisted as much as Nazism.

Decades later, I would be hired to take care of many an aging California communist in the final years of their lives. They were all thoughtful, caring people. I would also get to know some thoughtful, caring people on the other end of the political spectrum. And I would hear everybody’s opinions. Especially their opinions. Lots and lots of opinions. And I would read lots and lots of history, from reliable and unreliable sources.

It began to dawn on me that the problem may not be with this or that system, but with a minority of men (mostly men) of all stripes who are so addicted to power, status and wealth that they are willing to game any system available to them to satisfy that addiction — at the expense of everyone else. Some systems are just easier to game than others. And some systems are set up to be gamed.

In any case, the dilemma of how to end the cold war without giving in to what I then considered to be the utterly evil communists, and how to eliminate poverty without becoming an utterly evil communist, set up a philosophical tension that kept me from being COMPLETELY dogmatic when I was 21. That was the year I quit the music business forever for the first time, and set out to answer three questions: 1) What causes war, 2) What causes poverty, and 3) What the hell can we do about them? Read more