Not all, of course.
Posted on 09/26/2015 6:14:45 AM PDT by dontreadthis
he hippie movement, if indeed it can be called a movement, confronts the curious observer as a strange paradox. On the One hand, it is generally held to be part of the New Left, itself a vague conglomerate of youthful and not so youthful malcontents, pronouncing the most frightful imprecations upon our society and culture, and threatening the most ferocious assaults upon things as they are. On the other hand, these hippies appear to be so harmless, so peaceful, so utterly absorbed in love and bongo. Where do they fit into the picture of the New Left? Who are the hippies, what are they? Most emphatically, they are not to be identified with the old-line beatniks, with whom they may have some tenuous historical connection. They do not have the truculence, the menacing air, the ideological ferocity of the old-line beatnik; they do not congregate in foul dens in the slums. They are the “gentle people,” sun worshipers, love-mystics. No, they are not beatniks; but what are they?
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
Funny about your dad. I was little in the early 70s and on a family trip to San Francisco my father pulled me into a weird store with lots of prisms and rainbows and glass, with only the hippie types in there. Then he told me all the things sold in that store were for using drugs. I was stunned because in school we learned drugs were bad but this looked really fun. Ah well, I’m alive. :)
Sorry, but I’m remembering the “liberated” girls in halter tops from an affluent suburban high school. :)
Many traded in their tie-dyes for disco suits in the late 70s.
Hey! For all you know, she could be one of them!
Not all, of course.
You can revisit the 1960’s hippies by driving through The Redwoods National Forest, Humbolt County CA. You will pass several encampments with their sprayed bedsheet signs espousing the political flavor of the month.
The conclusion was profound as well, focusing on false "love," one of the most abused terms in the English language. True love is to desire the highest and best for another. This necessarily includes action and sacrifice, not simply wishing someone well.
dear mrsmel,
re:
“Like that “love and peace” group “Occupy”, which counted amongst its peaceful numbers, many rapists, thieves, and vandals.”
As one that was around, and old enough to witness the hippie movment up close and personal, your attempt to connect the ‘Occupy’ fools with the hippie movement, is false.
The ‘occupy’ fools espouse an Anarchist ideology, in which if it is opposite of your mindset, destroy it and build it to work for you. “Light the fuse and walk away, then watch the fun.”
The hippie movement was to NOT bother with the fabric of society, but if it bothered you, remove yourself from it.
My father was the kind to engage them, in Socratic discussions, and I, the all-absorbing brained teenager, would hear all the viewpoints, and then weigh them all out in later meditations, and toss the chaff when done.
I was 8 in 1970 which is about where my memory of the outside world begins. By 1973 I was aware of what was going on around me, and I remember that the guys with long hair tended to be mean bastards.
Looking back, the 1967 Summer of Love rapidly disintegrated, and took a permanent dark turn in, an example being the "Let it Bleed" attitude of Altamont in 1969. The release of Black Sabbath's first album in late 1969 marked the perfect coda for the decade. There was a big dark shape swimming around under the boat, which even I as a little kid was aware of.
...the men make no effort to exhibit an aggressive masculinity, nor the women a passionate feminine lure...
Written back in the 60's when such things were expected of guys and girls. The hippie mentality has worked its way into the mainstream it would appear.
Not me (wait, is that my nose growing??).
Interesting also how the author writes about sin and the paradox of life being both joyful and difficult, all seemingly lost on the hippies.
Acknowledgement and awareness of sin and the phoniness of self-imposed return to innocence. This was written in 1967 only three years after the feds unconstitutionally forbade prayer and the Bible in public schools, so biblical truths were still fairly widespread.
And the worst part was so many dumpy, frumpy, dirty hippie females.
Then I apologise, my knowledge of the whole hippie thing is mostly from documentaries and books and articles after the fact, and sometims it’s all a big jumble of hippies, Charles Manson Family, Black Panthers, Symbionese Liberation Army and Patty Hearst, and Woodstock.
I was born in 1963, but my growing -up days coincide with what the movie “Dazed And Confused” portrays, if I’d been a tiny bit older, not had such strict parents and came from a very large and working poor family, and never one of the “cool” people (too much of a bookworm and loner as a teen). I didn’t actually get involved with the culture around me until I was a young adult in the 80s, the whole Miami Vice scene.
So again, sorry.
Funny thing though-once I did start dating as a young woman, I always had a thing for guys with long-really long, like native American long, hair. They weren’t stoners, they were too hard-edged for that, I don’t know what category they’d go in. Rode Harleys, etc. And always much older than me, I never liked guys my own age.
Then I met my husband and the love of my life, who was the antithesis of everything I’d been attracted to before him, except age-wise (he’s 17 years older than me, not that that matters anymore at our ages, lol). He volunteered and served two tours in Vietnam, was at one time the youngest police detective in the US, grew up very fast as the main support of his family (starting at age 14), very streetwise and very hard. He scared me when I first met him, he had to practically bribe me to date him. Best decision I ever made, we’re over 30 years married now.
Yes, but the “commercial” hippie females (the well-groomed or at least clean ones) had such beautiful long hair that we don’t see anymore. Even the few young women who have long hair now, it’s considered “really long” if it’s bra strap length, and they all get the ends blunt cut. The hippie girls, some of them anyway, had really really long hair-waist length and longer (I was never a hippie, too young for that era, but my mother wouldn’t let is cut our hair and we could all sit on our hair), and they had what I’ve learned are called “fairy tale” ends-that is, ends which are just as they grew, not blunt-cut or shaped, just different lengths because hair grows at different rates and tends to thin out as it ages, and of course the ends of really long hair that doesn’t get regularly trimmed or blunt cut (whether straight, v-shape or U-shape) will be really old. I love really long hair with those “fairy tale ends” on young women, and I never see them anymore.
I love really long hair with those “fairy tale ends” on young women,....Maybe because all the fairies have them now?
The hippies IMO weren’t consciously “guided” by anything other than the anti-establishment buzz and a reaching out, some sincerely others insincerely, for freedom, love, and peace.
In 1966-1967 I left the San Francisco Bay Area to be a freshman at University of Washington. Nothing unusual was going on in Seattle. When I left the Bay Area, things seemed pretty normal but music was changing a bit with the Jefferson Airplane and the Filmore in San Francisco, but generally things seemed the same as they had always been.
But when I got back in the summer of 1967, things had changed A LOT. All my friends were doing marijuana and the hippie thing was on its way.
I got to the point where I thought the hippies had some kind of secret or answer. But I found out in 1968 that what attracted me to the hippies was the freedom and love that I received from Jesus Christ.
Seems like there was a fork in the road for the hippies and the hippie movement. The “Jesus People” were the hippies whose sincere search for love and freedom brought them to Jesus Christ. Those who, as Bob Dylan said, just wanted to be on the side that’s winning, may have chanted “peace and freedom” but one way or the other their chants turned into cries for more and more government and less and less freedom.
I feel like the whole hippie thing was an emotional/spiritual filling of a vacuum left in society after the federal government unconstitutionally banned prayer and the Bible in public schools, although American society had been moving steadily away from faith in God for a long time and has continued in that direction until today.
Plus, hippie chicks were easy.
I don’t know-I don’t get around much, but I can’t recall seeing a sodomite with what I’d call long hair. Truth to tell, I’m not aware of having ever met a sodomite in real life, not ever, and I’m over 50. I guess I don’t run in the same circles that they do.
But they need to leave the “fairy tale ends” speaking hair-wise, alone! They’ve ruined enough things already! (Thank goodness, someone pointed out to me that the real rainbow has seven colors, while the sodomite rainbow has six.)
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