I hope that a large portion of the Penn State student body will take the opportunity to see the performance of the play Hair, being presented by the Penn State Thespians in Schwab Auditorium this week.

Beside the fact that the play is good entertainment, this play offers some messages that it appears our student body desperately needs to hear.

In this new age of conservative politics and philosophy, some of us who are old enough are witnessing some not-so-new behaviors and attitudes which to a large degree go unchallenged as hard-headed, pragmatic, good American values.

There was a time, not very long ago (yesterday perhaps) when any form of political and personal dissent from convention was dealt with harshly in this country. In this "Land of the Free ..." there was no freedom for women, Native Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans and others.

Any examination of the current status of these groups will show that in the "New Age" there has been a steady effort to reduce their freedom in a number of ways. The resistance to those efforts has been encouraging and that resistance is building again to resemble that which was mounted in the dreaded 60s.

Hair is an attempt to encapsulate the attitudes and the explorations of the people who were seeking understanding of who they were and asking hard questions about why things were as they were in that decade.

Of course, conservative philosophy believes that social conditions are essentially unalterable and therefore not to be questioned and certainly any efforts to change them is a waste of time and resources.

The decade of the sixties was one in which a wide range of people, young, middle-aged and old, white, black, red, yellow and brown, poor and affluent, female and male came together to question the assumptions of the society and to challenge the conventions of a repressive society. In its most outrageous moments, Hair does the same thing.

It confronts us with intolerance head on and forces us to evaluate. It confronts us with some of the mores of society and asks us "why". It takes some of the most entrenched attitudes about sex, race and relationships and asks us is this what we are really supposed to be about?

There is no doubt that some will be offended by some aspects of this play. Yet, offensive or not, it is an important mirror for us to stare into and perhaps discover the future by looking at the past.

The play Hair is here now. The ideas of Hair are on their way back.