"You're either on the bus or off the bus."

It's an old hippie saying that sprang to mind when I looked at this photo (taken a week ago in Madison).



What exactly did it mean? From Tom Wolfe's "Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test":

[Ken] Kesey's explicit teachings were all cryptic, metaphorical; parables, aphorisms: "You're either on the bus or off the bus." "Feed the hungry bee," "Nothing lasts," "See with your ears and hear with your eyes," "Put your good where it will do the most," "What did the mirror say? It's done with people."... The world was simply and sheerly divided into "the aware," those who had the experience of being vessels of the divine, and a great mass of "the unaware," "the unmusical," "the unattuned." Or: you're either on the bus or off the bus. Consciously, the Aware were never snobbish toward the Unaware, but in fact most of that great jellyfish blob of straight souls looked like hopeless cases...