Not many people flying the hardline flag these days, largely because Sean claimed to have both invented h-l and disbanded it. At the same time, h-l was proclaimed to be ever-present like the logos: in the beginning was the word, and the word was hardline. Thus h-l remains and always will, waiting for new people to take up the reins.

While many mistakes were made during h-l’s official presence, most notably the queer bashing (despite the sometime denial) and the macho posturing, h-l was and remains relevant for the same reasons much of the 90s environmental and hardcore movements were and are relevant: in many ways…THEY WERE RIGHT, as follows:

Corporations were and continue killing the planet with limited time and political will to save the earth and all its inhabitants. All innocent life does have the right to live out its natural state of existence in peace, without interference. This single ethic ensures that all life, from a foetus or a grown human, to an animal or its habitat is guaranteed equal rights, with liberty for all, regardless of someones personal bias against them.

Music is a prime driver of vegan, straight edge and punk sensibilities. The solution to our troubles isn’t an assemblage of single-issue causes–but a massive problem requiring a unified, intersectional struggle. Veganism is the single-most important change that the individual can take to destroy babylon and free the mind, body and soul from the shackles of illusion. Sobriety, straight edge, is the oath that, along with spirituality or religion, keeps our minds free to better hear the voice of God, or nature, or whatever a person wants to call their higher power with the aim of aligning ourselves with our part to play. We should refrain from consumption of cash-crops like coffee, tobacco, cannabis, and chocolate since we support exploitation of people and the earth when we consume them. Likewise, pornography is a problem for a significant segment of our youth, destroying the sacred notions of what sex can be, defiling the other and the self. We should be eating largely whole foods, unrefined, stayig away from animal foods.

Lessons to be learned; people are afraid of the label hardline because of what came before: a lot of young, inexperienced “men” playing at being tough/spiritual guys, or revolutionaries; playing at being men with no meaningful experience being men. A lot of hate and occasional violence; pseudo-alignment with other radical groups like MOVE. That’s a lot to overcome, raising the notion of whether the label is worth saving at all, perhaps better left in the dustbin of history.

These things said, many movements have a history that they themselves don’t necessarily agree with, but they don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Likewise with h-l, we can keep the best and leave the rest…if we want.

Innocent life is sacred and we don’t have to agree with abortion, or deny its brutality and ugliness, to accept that it’s sometimes the best path for the mother. LGBTQIA+ people don’t have much “say” in their sexual preference, assigned sex or even gender identity; they too should have the right to live out their lives in a natural state of existence. They are part of the grandeur order of things.

We can leave the worst parts in the past and move forward to eden, aligning our spiritual, intellectual, physical planes in what is one of the most-challenging reformulations of the self–the hardline, the spiritual, vegan straight edge. We are entering a time of great social change with the continuing rise of technology, fascism, authoritarianism and widespread ecological disaster. The same disparities that h-l railed against in the past continue to flourish and we’ll need all our strength and wits to survive.

I will take up the h-l mantle and I wonder how many more there are out there?