Hippie Fest, Incorporated

Warning! A roving band of Hippie Icons may soon be coming to a city near you!

It all started on a sunkist Saturday at Wild Adventure theme park, here in Valdosta, Georgia. Concerts are a regular here, and I've seen some great bands: Foreigner, Styx, REO Speedwagon.

Before I begin, let me just say that I am 35 years old. Never really saw the hippie movement. Read about it, saw the footage of Woodstock, etc. But I never really experienced it. And for that, I think God.

It was an outdoor event, with families lining lawn chairs up, loading the kids up with popcorn and burgers, and settling in for a good show. Although not my generation, I have always loved classic rock. And by classic rock, I mean Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, etc.

I expected to see decent, hard working people in the crowd, like I had seen at the other concerts. This was not to be the case.

As if the pictures and videos I've seen of Woodstock came alive, it was now. But there was no beauty. Fat, bloated hippies, hurrying their hippie wives, streamed onto the field. Most men had hair down to the small of their backs, their wives the same. Grey was the common, and lots of it. When I looked at their faces, long, cavernous wrinkles bore into their flesh. So deep you could shove an envelope into it and it would stay. A pungent and distinct aroma wafted around, like a camper that has not showered in a few days. And the looks on their faces. The look of pure intolerance, of pure selfishness, of pure hatred.

I should have left with my fiancé right then and there.

Country Joe McDonald walked out first. I have heard some of his music, and honestly, not that big of a fan. He attempted some humor, and then broke out into "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag". If you are not in the know, it's an anti-Vietnam song. The crowd went wild. I looked at my fiancé and said "Do they not realize that this was 30 years ago?" It was like they were reliving their past protests all over again.

What happened next was unbelievable. He has a new song, ripe with criticism about Bush, Cheney, Rice, etc. The vulgarities flew with every venomous breath he took. Mind you, there were little kids all over the place, but their (grandparents) laughed and lauded every vile insult thrown at the President.

The concert went on, with performances by Melanie, Iron Butterfly, and the Animals. All night long, slogans like " we can all live in peace", "we're all brothers", and "make love, not war" was shouted at the crowd. But interestingly, I saw otherwise.

All night long, security for the bands made their way through the crowd, screaming at people to stop videotaping the show. I mean, getting in their face, finger pointing, yelling. All the while, the bands kept spouting about how evil capitalism is, how imperialistic we are, etc. But after each performance, we were told to "go to the white tent to purchase tonight’s video, and buy a few tee shirts to support the cause." Hypocrisy at its best.

The people in the crowd were amazing. Hippies know that smoking pot leads to the munchies, but apparently the never cared. Most people had tie-dye shirts on their bloated, beer gut bellies. After reading "make love" one too many times on these walking pregnant lava lamps, I almost threw up thinking about what it actually might look like.

Sorry for the long rave, but my point is this: the hippie generation caused a lot of damage to this nation. It is evident that deep down, they hate this country. They loathe capitalism, unless it keeps them from making a buck. They think it's OK to spew profanities in front of kids, as long as it bashes Republicans. And the amount of trash that was left on the ground from them was disgusting.

But hey! Someone else will clean it up for them. They are too busy lecturing us on Global Warming!

But we're all doing it because we don't want people to die. Ever. If this war would save lives in the long run, we'd be for it. But it won't. Maybe one of the primary differences between the two camps is that we think that Iraqi civilians have just as much of a right to live as do US civilians.

I hope you mean don't want people to die of anything but natural causes. I refer you to a quote by Ray Kurzweil:

Take death for example, a great deal of our effort goes into avoiding it. We make extraordinary efforts to delay it, and often consider its intrusion a tragic event. Yet we'd find it hard to live without it. Death gives meaning to our lives. It gives importance and value to time. Time would become meaningless if there were too much of it. If death were indefinitely put off, the human psyche would end up...well...like the gambler in the Twilight Zone episode.

As for the rest of your quote, this war has saved lives. It's saved Western lives. If your government had done NOTHING after September 11th, there would quite probably have been MORE attacks like that. The thing that people on your side of the aisle don't understand is that these people live in a culture where death and hate are the norm. Take the recent article I read on FR where two young Muslim girls were put to death by their uncles after running off with two guys in a orchard. That is a key visual for the hippies, free love, guess what...these people don't believe in any of your hippie crap.

I was going to go into a long diatribe here, but thought better of it. Needless to say, there are good and peaceful Muslims, but for the most part they are the ones that have embraced Western values and culture.

4 years of an obviously failed strategy is too much. Change tactics radically, or stop. Those are the only realistic choices.

Your side won't let the proper change of tactics occur. It's called peace through superior firepower. Stopping is not an option. We stop, we lose. The problem is that we are only fighting a proxy war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The more we look at it, it is the Russians via the Iranians that we are fighting. Same war, different players. We need to get those countries sewn up so that we can concentrate on the greater threat.

The only saving grace that we have is that the Iranians dislike the Russians as much as they dislike us. The only reason that they are aligned is that the Russians will supply them and we won't.

Ugh...I didn't want to go into a long diatribe on the war.

You wrote, "Maybe one of the primary differences between the two camps is that we think that Iraqi civilians have just as much of a right to live as do US civilians."

I see that your account has been suspended, as it should've been, but I hope you're still reading this thread because your comment merits a response.

You instantly claim the moral high ground, and do so based upon a false assumption; i.e., conservatives who support the war in Iraq hold little regard for Iraqi lives--or rather, far less regard for their lives as you do, enlightened, peace-loving soul that you are. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The President could've taken a purely punitive approach, destroying the Iraqi armed forces, killing Saddam and his psychotic sons, establishing the Kurds as an independent nation-state to the north, and leaving. But no, we stayed--and we stayed for the sake of the Iraqi people, to help them rebuild their country into something peaceful, and safe, and democratic, and worthwhile. You and yours, so peace-loving, so humane, so genteel, would've been happy with the status quo under Saddam, with his gas attacks on civilians, and industrial meat shredders, and his torture chambers.

I loathe you, and despise you. I call you coward and morally bankrupt.

---one of the primary differences between the two camps is that we think that Iraqi civilians have just as much of a right to live as do US civilians.

I think one of the primary differences is that your side ignores the killing that Saddam did. As bad as the carnage has been in Iraq, it is still less deadly than when he was free to mass murder his own citizens.
http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/27000.htm You really fell for the Michael more Iraqi's flying kites didn't you?

You also are unable to think historically and connect the end of Desert Storm 1991 (begun when he invaded Kuwait) when Saddam agreed to stop seeking WMDs. What if Saddam has listened to people like you who think of goodness and peace and used his oil money to feed his people and develop his country rather than invading his neighbors and seeking to exact revenge after we defeated him in 1991?

More (from an article in the American Thinker
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......Let's move to today, with the U.S. in Iraq. What was Iraq doing before the U.S. invaded in 2003? Saddam had already gone to war with two neighbors, Iran and Kuwait, resulting in over a million dead. Saddam killed hundreds of thousands of his own people; there are over 400,000 dead in mass graves throughout Iraq. He had lobbed rockets into Saudi Arabia and Israel, shot at U.S. aircraft on UN sanctioned missions and tried to assassinate former President Bush. He financially rewarded the families of suicide bombers. And he once had and used WMD, and could make them again.

Yet somehow people seem to believe that if we'd just let Saddam alone, there would be little or no violence in Iraq. Let's review. When we did leave him alone, the death count easily reached 1,400,000 or more. When we merely imposed sanctions, we were accused of causing the deaths of over half a million children. Now that we've invaded, we're chided for 3,000 American dead and perhaps some tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians.

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We also think that you hate this country for exactly what you post....

"that much of what is wrong has come from this country - though you try to be morally equivalent and include Russia and China" (

be honest - you don't believe that Russia and China have done anything wrong do you?). Your ilk just loves the strongmen, the death camps, the executions that socialism represents. Here is what you consider US morally equivalent to... from the same article in American Thinker.

The list below is a complete listing of all alleged genocides since 1915, according to Wikipedia.

Japan 1910-45. Japanese killed 25,000,000 Chinese and enslaved millions of Koreans.

Turkey 1915-23. Turks (Muslims) killed 1,500,000 Armenians (Christians).

Soviet Union 1918-89. Soviet Communists killed 20,000,000. (Fatality count is from The Black Book of Communism.

Germany 1940-45. Nazis killed 11,000,000 Jews, Romas, homosexuals, Slavs, the mentally ill and communists.

Croatia 1941-45. Croats (Catholics) killed 500,000 Serbs
(Christian Orthodox).

China 1950-80. Chinese Communists killed 65,000,000 fellow Chinese. (Fatality count from The Black Book of Communism.)

Zanzibar 1964. Africans killed 5,000 Arabs and Jews.

Bangladesh 1971. Muslims killed 1,500,000 Hindus.

Burundi 1972. Tutsis killed 125,000 Hutus.

Cambodia 1975-79. Communist Cambodians killed 1,700,000 fellow Cambodians.

East Timor 1975-99. Indonesian military (Muslim) killed 150,000 Timors, including many ethnic Chinese.

Afghanistan 1979-89. Soviet Communists killed unspecified number of Afghans.

Lebanon (Sabra) 1982. Christians killed 750 to 3,500 Palestinians.

Sudan 1983-2007. Arab/Muslims killed over 2,000,000 Africans.

Iraq 1988. Iraq's government (Sunni dominated) killed unspecified number of Kurds.

Tibet before 1990. Communist Chinese killed unspecified number of Tibetans.

West New Guinea/Papua before 1990. Indonesian government (Muslim) killed unspecified number of Guineans/Papuans.
Bosnia 1992-95. Serbs killed at least 8,000, mostly Muslim.

Rwanda 1994. Hutus killed 937,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

(((Note that it has been revealed that France incited the Rwandan genocide)))

Gee where is the US on that list? But your favorites Russia and China they are near the top. And this list doesnt include countless small wars of "revolution" fostered by Russia and China. But we're just the same.

Yes, so much of what is wrong with the world has come from the US. That must be why the Poles are erecting a statue to Reagan for freeing them from communist oppression. http://gaypatriot.net/2007/02/09/reagan-statue-to-replace-soviet-monument-in-poland .

why girls can go to school in Afghanistan
http://www.care.org/newsroom/articles/2005/04/20050408_gce_afghanistanstory.asp

Why South Koreans are prosperous and North Koreans starve.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/asia/june97/korea_6-11.html
http://www.rfa.org/english/news/2006/11/08/nkorea_starvation/

Why tens of thousands of lives were saved after the tsunami
http://www.heritage.org/Press/Commentary/ed011105d.cfm

You know so little. Keep coming to Free Republic and learn more about your country so will have a genuine love of your country and a realistic view of its successes and flaws.

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