Posted on 06/11/2006 9:28:46 AM PDT by Graybeard58
laughed out loud at Brett Rosenberg's letter to the Rocky Mountain News of June 1, "Where have hippies, their idealism gone?" Thank you, Mr. Rosenberg, for making my day. Here's why:
I was one of those hippies, and I can guarantee you we didn't change one thing, unless you consider wearing long hair even if it cost us jobs, rarely bathing even if we had fleas, and constantly mooching off of friends, relatives and strangers to be "social consciousness, awareness and regime change."
I dropped out of college and joined an aimless troupe of longhairs in an inner-city commune in the heart of - surprise! - New Orleans. There were 23 of us in what is known as a three-story shotgun house in a bad never-go-outside-alone kind of neighborhood off Canal Street. The last time the place had been painted, inside or out, was 1945. My brother, not exactly clean and sober himself, liked to call our humble, bursting little home The Vegetable Factory. Don't ask.
I was the only one of this motley crew with a steady job, working as a girl Friday for a well-known law firm on Carondelet Street that was established by powerful, staunch conservatives whose cases ran the gamut of blue-collar, low-income murders and domestic abuse to white-collar Enron-type stuff - but you can call them The Man if it makes you feel better.
My commune brothers and sisters, however, had other plans. Most of them, when they couldn't beg, borrow or steal money for drugs, alcohol, food and other erstwhile pursuits, would don their cleanest dirty clothes and head out to the local dry cleaning shop or trinket boutique or desperate restaurant and finagle themselves brief stints as actual employees - until, after about a week at best, they would somehow manage to intentionally get themselves fired so they could collect welfare and food stamps for a reasonable, fun-filled period of time.
Unless, of course, they managed to deal drugs, which earned our cozy little commune the privilege of 18-hour-a- day surveillance by the New Orleans Police Department, in two marked patrol cars, two officers per car, every day.
I didn't deal drugs, but I knew this did not make me safe, because in order to keep my worthless live-in boyfriend, I stayed there, even if it meant I could go to jail any minute just for living in that house. My job, my appearance, and the fact that I was only 20, would have made no difference whatsoever.
And the fun didn't stop there. We didn't need pets - we had bugs. In our home, on our friends, on the strangers who visited (other hippies who appeared out of nowhere to eat what little food we had, steal our possessions and sleep on our mattresses, which were on the floor). To turn the kitchen light on at night gave you a treat that can only be compared to something on the Discovery Channel. Every possible species of cockroach would run, crawl, leap or fly for the shadows.
And as to what Rosenberg considered hippies' mammoth impact on the "free world regarding sexism, religion and war," consider this:
Sexism? Hippie guys were fully capable of being as sexist as the next guy, pal. Every female hippie I knew, excepting myself, had had numerous abortions. Racism? There were no blacks or Hispanics in our commune of 23. The environment? Dude, we lived on and in a garbage dump. War? What war? Oh yeah, "War is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things." How's that?
And finally, religion. No one ever mentioned God, Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad, Joseph Smith, Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny or Siddhartha. No one thought about God, no one honored him for keeping our worthless behinds out of jail, no one went to church, temple or meeting house. We were too busy being overgrown, lazy children in the Land of Id. We had other things to do. Like blow bubbles in the park, get the neighbor's cat high, and burn down most of the house burning candles on a piece of crumbling driftwood.
Where have all the hippies gone? If they survived their not-brief-enough stint as spoiled and selfish twits, they grew up, like me, and were given real love, real honor and - if they were really lucky - God. If they somehow gained some smarts, they learned to urge their children to not do as they did, and they told them why.
Sounds about right.
A lot of those hippies "grew up" to take positions of influence in government, education, and the media. That's exactly why we're in the shape we are now. I hope it's not long before these folks slide into irrelevance and the kids of the Reagan generation move on up.
And then you have whiny spineless fog brained hippies like Niel Young,
I hang my head in shame to say I tried hard to be one of those hippie types. I say type because I just could never fully believe any of it..not the free love, anti-war, Age of Aquarius story line.
My family was so conventional and so Republican that I played at being a hippie- but when push came to shove- I wore a bra, showered daily and was only too happy to be part of a family that kept me fed, clothed and well-educated.
I did participate in long, deep and "conciousness-raising" discussions long into the night aided by several glasses of wine and some pot- we were SO self-important we just knew we'd discoverd the Meaning of Life.
We were BRATS.
I'd like to think that hippies were the archetypal boomers, a generation that discovered everything but learned nothing .
Shamefully I too, was a hippie sympathizer for a short time, while not a full blown hippie, I did go to a Hendrix concert,where I got abducted for a few hours by Hells Angels who forcibly used me for a test rat, and I did hang out with some kook strangers at Big Sur and Yosemite when I wandered around on my motorcycle like "then came Bronson"...
then I grew up
I thought that was you.
Cartman rules! :)
Boy, isn't THAT the truth. We did actually believe we'd discovered truths that no one before us had ever known and it made us impossible to communicate with.."the generation gap".
Our parents- after living through the depression and World War II- were simply too damn good to us. We were blessed in ways we were incapable of recognizing or appreciating.
I was well into my 30's before I began to get it.
The only thing that happened is that a lot of them really were intelligent enough to clean themselves up and disappear into the mainstream so that they could wreak havoc with this country. They became addicted to money instead of drugs. They were willing to give up "free love" ... and they have infiltrated every foundation to tap into a source of free money. They all went underground where they thought they would be invisible. Clue: look toward the left if you want to find them.
When the last hippie dies this country will be free again ... if it is not too late.
About forty years ago, I was one of those who was perfectly willing to believe that the left had the answer to all of world’s problems. But in a few years I, like so many others, discovered that the “progressive movement” wasn’t about problem solving; quite the opposite actually. Many of us made a honest break in the ‘71-’72 “March on Washington” time period and embarked on our own Long March to the Right.
Oddly, the really “committed” lefties stayed on and saw the triumphs of 1974’s Silent Coup, the fall of Saigon and subsequent killing fields, Helsinki, the installation of Mr. Peanut as president, and then they inexplicably bugged out. And so the Liberal Golden Age was over in barely five years.
And now these same “progressives” sit in their $650,000 homes with their kids in private schools or going for advanced degrees, and drive around in their Lexus and Acuras still saying to anyone who will listen,
“America just f**ks you over, man - it really just f**ks you over!”
$650,000 home? The establishment could have given me several more estates...but they f**ked me over! ~~John Kerry talking to Arianna Huffington
LOL, I was just thinking of this very episode.....
Well, if you really learned your lesson, you tell your kids this is what I did and why it was a waste of time...but then you tell them, "You will make your own choices and maybe not listen to me." Because if we've learned anything, kids don't listen to their parents much anyway.
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