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.
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.