Yesterday we raced another 250 miles back to Kathi’s in rain and wind, on freeway and mountain pass. It was hard, and we were exhausted. So we did the obvious thing when we got off our bikes.

 
We went to a rave.
 

Well, sort of. We went to see Savoy and four other EDM acts at Red Rocks Amphitheater. My ex-wife had managed to befriend the drummer on a plane ride to Dallas, and I’ve been into EDM since my first trip to Black Rock City, so we ditched the bikes, hopped in the truck and headed right back down the way we had come. The safety and comfort of the Toyota Tacoma was not lost on us.  

 
Red Rocks is a beautiful place to see any kind of show, but perfect for EDM, which is as much about the lighting and visual stimulation as the thumping. EDM is truly the sugar, salt, fat of music. A distillation of music into the simplest and most appealing components of melody, rhythm and lyric, designed, like the drugs that fuel it, to nail your serotonin receptors pitch perfect, nurture a dependence, and make anything more demanding unbearably dull. Void of nutrition, for the most part, but on any given day I might prefer it to Glenn Gould, Coltrane or Zeppelin. Or kale. 
 
We were, let’s say, older than average. Okay, we did not see one single person, in a sea of 9,000, within twenty years of our age unless they were wearing a badge. 
 
Our tickets, in other words, were a window into a culture in which we are not quite members, much like the motorcycles are on the road. Nobody is really going to confuse us for club kids or Wingmen, but in both cases a genuine shared enthusiasm for what’s at hand, along with the distractions of all the trappings that surround it, can be enough to obscure social differences for long enough to forge a human connection.  
 
When I’m lucky enough to be in these positions, sharing brews with Dusty Bone–a retired trucker from Wyoming who lives at the Saratoga motel he manages–or digging on the bass drop with a 19 year-old club kid with the same first name but a background in pharmacology rather than philosophy, I’m always reminded of how essentially similar we all are. I’m always reminded that much of what I take to be true or important is the sheer accident of time and place. Given a few hundred miles in almost any direction—or thirty years backwards or forwards—my values, my habits and my politics could have been drastically different. 
 
This isn’t to say that you can lump all world views in together as morally equivalent, one as good as the other. They are not.   Some are ill-informed, some well-informed. Some dishonest attempts to manipulate others, some genuine attempts to understand what is true.   Some more fearful and rigid, some more courageous and empathetic. The arc of history, I would insist, is clearly on the side of the latter.
 
But these windows remind me: People are people. And when you put good people in different situations, good people can believe radically different things.
 
The grisly biker and the omni-sexual raver—in so far as they approach their stereotypes– are probably on opposite sides of our culture wars, buy they are not so very different. They want basically the same things for themselves.  They fear, they desire, they love.
 
You don’t need a road trip or a rave to see this, by the way.    The journey inside and the journey outside ultimately lead to the same wisdom: We are fundamentally the same. And we are wise to give, to absorb a little bit, when we hit a culture shock.