No anger, Ansel, sorry.
You have to acknowledge that you are a bit of a gadfly, right? When you light on someone and take a little bite, they are occasionally likely to react with a harmless swipe.
I just think we are playing a game of definitions here. You say you are a hippie and all those other people weren’t-—well, that’s fine.
But the larger questions are whether the cohort of Americans who were born or came of age in the post-War years have radically transformed American politics and society, and whether that cohort was shaped in some way by the anti-establishment/anti-war leftist drugs/sex/rock-n-roll movement so many of us associate with “hippies.”
I know that the people I mentioned are establishment figures now. That is my point. I was trying to suggest to you that during the 60s that type of person was almost certainly radicalized, and was hanging out with “hippies,” and they were not focused on conservation and self-sufficiency and thoughtful living, as were you.
I appreciated your response, Ansel, and apologize for my snappishness.
The thing is that none of those people were ever anywhere close to being hippies, they are driven individuals, ambitious, demanding people, they are seeking power, recognition, influence, wealth, professional success, they were never mild mannered drop outs seeking to escape the system and be left alone and get in touch with nature, life and themselves.
If you want to see people similar to hippies today, then look to those people who are still trying to live outside of the system, who don’t care about money and power, I still prefer the company of the pick-up driving, guitar playing independent drop out types with their gardens and their ‘earth mother’ wives, barefoot kids, and their guns and wood burning stoves, who might or might not wear a ponytail, but have friends who do.
In the 1970s and 1980s I would scoff at the left’s ubiquitous heroic TV figure of the “ex-hippie” who was now an heroic Attorney and so on, as I pointed out to people, those weren’t hippies, they had been ambitious college students who smoked pot, and attended some rock concerts, and had possibly had contact with some hippies, but hippies did not get PHDs and law degrees,and were not among the most driven, competitive, ambitious people in America.
Hippies were baffled by those people, I remember looking at the yippies, and thinking that the 60s were over.
The yippies and their type are what many people today think were hippies, they were the opposite.
Yippies and their similars, were the Cornell Wests, David Axelrod types, man how I despised them, and the corrupt people who created them and empowered them, the judges who refused to maintain order in their court rooms, as the yippies turned trials into circuses, the college presidents who pretended to oppose them, and then let them takeover and reshape the universities, today hippie just means anything and everything related to the 1960s.
In many ways America moved right under the boomers, the left managed their great swath of fatal destruction of America, from about 1935 through 1979, the fatal dagger was the 1965 Immigration Act.
People don’t realize that the Vietnam war was supported by the under 30s more so than any other age group, and that Vietnam was overwhelmingly fought by volunteers, or that in 1972 with the Vietnam war going, the draft going, and all the other wild stuff, the under 30 vote went for Nixon by 52%, or that one of the great Christian revivals emerged from that core street hippie identity which led to the Christian right.
The 1960s were immensely complex and passionate, and it is difficult to neatly package the different elements and endless shades and diversity of the incredibly open and hot blooded times.