Well lots of those same hippies are in top positions in government fing things up
They’re all Bernies!
ping for later
Meet the New Left, same as the Old Left. Just skip forward two generations
Best part of the hippie movement was the lack of bras.
I was watching a program about the Zodiac killer; in it, the interviewed a San Francisco cop who was on the street back then.
He said “in 67, the kids were told to bring flowers if they came to San Francisco. By 68, it would have been a good idea to bring a revolver.”
I’ve known several hippies. I’ve noticed if they were hippies in the 60’s, they are hippies in their 60’s. Same goes with their low energy happy go lucky work ethic. Quite harmless.
I’ve also worked with and for the college educated ones that went to college to avoid Vietnam or to just be a part of a protest movement. They are the radicals in power now. They are essentially a fifth column, doing as much damage from within as they can muster. Most are very unhappy people.
This was a good read. Very timely in my case. Thanks
Many became Reagan voters
the one thing they got right was a deep distrust of government. the one thing they abandoned was independence from government.
We drove through the park and saw the long hair and the beards and the sandals and the pipes and the braless women and everything seem to have been tie-dyed. There were little kids who looked like they hadn't had a good meal in a while. They were the biggest bunch of bums I had ever seen. I even saw a man doing something with a dog I will not relate here on this forum. I asked my dad what he thought about them and he said, "It looks like they will never amount to a hill of beans."
Everything the hippies have touched in the last 50 years has turned to crap.
It looks like my dad's observation hit it right out of the park.
I think we were right only in this. Peace requires inner transformation; no “system” can provide it. In just about everything else we were as wrong as can be.
It was interesting. Though some of the interests, styles, and lingo lasted, my opinion at the time was that the Hippies phenomenon was done by 1969 or 70 and even beginning to fade by the end of 67. It budded in 1965 and blossomed in 67, and faded fast.
I think it failed because most people want to do something, even if it's just make fancy candles to sell at Woodstock.
For my part, by the autumn of 67 I had come to believe that man's imperfections were serious and that he was not perfectible and certainly not by trying to be gentle, generous, and happy.
So I thought of the effort as a kind of naive flash in the pan. But it was too obviously impossible, as the waiting rooms of the STD clinics and the reliance on the generosity of people who actually had jobs made clear.
I think these things happen over and over again in history.
So there's that, anyway....
I remember those days well. Sex, Drugs, Rock and Roll! Tun in, Turn on, Drop out!
The ones I remember were counter-culture. Anything that could be considered “Middle Class” was railed against. Their biggest target was MARRIAGE and family life! “Outdated! Old hat! Unnecessary”. If you loved someone you just shacked up with them! After all, the marriage license was “only a piece of paper”!
Now those old Hippies and their children consider marriage the most important thing two people can engage in, but ONLY if you are GAY!
A fact about the original Hippies that is seldom mentioned is that they were great believers in personal filth. That is, they often abhorred bathing, to the point where they could be smelled downwind from a block away. Even those attending university could horribly pollute classrooms with their stench.
And, by the latter part of the 1960s, they created such an explosion of venereal diseases that the public health authorities had to begin a multimedia advertising campaign against VD.
What began with the “love beads” Hippies, espousing idealistic claptrap, evolved into disgusting and violent chaos by the time of the Altamont Free Concert in 1969.
Importantly, in most of the US, Hippies were rare, preferring to flock to the coasts to spread their grossness. But middle American teenagers absorbed some of their fashion sense in little ways, and were much cleaner than the bona fides.
The unnerving nature of the military draft, and how it was unfairly and disturbingly applied, did much to create the Hippies, as did the first great burst of leftism in the universities, and the very limited mass media, basically just three TV networks and newspapers.
The flip side to this was the abject boredom found in the newly built midwestern and western cities and suburbs. Because there were so very few recreations, and yet there were inexpensive musical instruments, garage bands proliferated. And though there were a vast number of these, the competition forced a lot of creativity in music.
There is a website that streams recordings of a lot of “also ran” music from the time. While not good enough to make the big time, it was enough to be played on the radio, at least in regional markets.
http://www.beyondthebeatgeneration.com/
I remember despising them back when this article was written. I haven’t changed my mind. They wanted a life without responsibility or demands - all pleasure, no work. Some died, most outgrew it, and the rest went into either education or government.
If you can remember the sixties then YOU WERE NOT THERE. ;^)
like, bump for later, man.