Summer of love: 40 years later - Hippie Hippie Shakedown: But where was love?

DailyNews.com ^ | 06/16/2007 | DAWN EDEN

[Cogadh na Sith]

They aren’t, weren’t hippies ... they were, are 60’s radicals ... SDS.

As they say in my generation: "Whatever."

[Maelstrom]

Didn’t Rod Serling do just that?

[Borges]

Spielberg doesn’t belong in the same trough with Moore as he has celebrated American culture throughout his career.

[Maelstrom]

Sure, there’s a solution, but the first step is to recognize that everything you have eloquently worshipped in this thread is wrong at one level or another.

I believe your sanity has suffered.

[Borges]

You had to be 21 to vote in 1964. That would put the youngest voters as being born in 1943. Not a single hippie or baby boomer cast a vote in that election.

[Cogadh na Sith]

You had to be 21 to vote in 1964. That would put the youngest voters as being born in 1943. Not a single hippie or baby boomer cast a vote in that election.

So the 'Greatest Generation' were weird old socialists?

No wonder Tom Brokow likes them.

I guess there was really no such thing as hippies, Steven Spielberg celebrates American Values and Nancy Pelosi is a conservative....

You're right, the crime rate, tax rate, interest rate, divorce rate and American Malaise was really increased by the 9 year old Gen-Xers in 1976.

For the Baby Boomer, every President is Nixon, every war is Vietnam, every governor is George Wallace, every black politician is Martin Luther King, every wife is barefoot and pregnant, every homosexual orgy is the Stonewall Riot and every March is the March on Selma.

I, and my cohort, will never achieve such wide-eyed never aging perfection. If your erection lasts more than four hours seek medical attention.

[SuziQ]

One does see lost geriatric flower children with stringy hair and rotten teeth who contracepted or aborted the children who could have taken care of them in their old age.

Ouch! As my teenage gamer son would say, "Sick burn!"

[Borges]

Huh? I stated the chronological fact that LBJ was elected in 1964 mostly by WW2 vets and their parents. I don’t know where you got that other stuff. And SS does celebrate American values in his work.

[livius]

Yes, but it's the nature of teenagers to suck up anything that sounds like fun. It's the responsibility of their parents to say no.

This very same "Greatest Generation" was funding their kids' stay in the Haight. These kids virtually all got checks from home, in addition to what they made by panhandling and selling drugs. And their thinking had been shaped by teachers and professors much older than they, who seemed to be living out their "rebellions" vicariously through these kids, who were free to sleep around, use drugs, act irresponsibly, etc. in a way that they felt they had been deprived of doing.

A lot of it had to do with the influence of Freudian psychology in the academic world, although the United States has always had a fondness for the image of the noble savage, unfettered by society, that was similar to the (as popularized) Freudian idea that everybody was busy repressing all sorts of things and had to let go of their repressions and let it all hang out. Universities acquired a number of German and French professors around the time of WWII, many of them both Marxist and Freudian in their orientation, who were very influential in molding the academic climate that would later influence hippie "thought."

So while this stuff was always bubbling along underneath in American liberalism (look at Dewey's educational theories), I think it took the influence of European theories, plus the presence of a previously undreamt of level of affluence, to produce the social melt-down that occurred.

[knarf]

"Sure, there’s a solution, but the first step is to recognize that everything you have eloquently worshipped in this thread is wrong at one level or another."

"I believe your sanity has suffered."

Prove it.

[Maelstrom]

"Sure, there’s a solution, but the first step is to recognize that everything you have eloquently worshipped in this thread is wrong at one level or another."

"I believe your sanity has suffered."

Prove it.

Step one: Recognize that these quotations were made from a basis of knowledge after long study of past governments throughout human history:

"[V]irtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government." George Washington

"Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim tribute to patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness -- these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. . . . reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principles." George Washington

"Human rights can only be assured among a virtuous people. The general government . . . can never be in danger of degenerating into a monarchy, an oligarchy, an aristocracy, or any despotic or oppresive form so long as there is any virtue in the body of the people." George Washington

"Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become more corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters." Benjamin Franklin

"A nation as a society forms a moral person, and every member of it is personally responsible for his society." Thomas Jefferson

"No government can continue good but under the control of the people; and . . . . their minds are to be informed by education what is right and what wrong; to be encouraged in habits of virtue and to be deterred from those of vice . . . . These are the inculcations necessary to render the people a sure basis for the structure and order of government." Thomas Jefferson

"It is in the manners and spirit of a people which preseve a republic in vigour. . . . degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats into the heart of its laws and constitution." Thomas Jefferson

"When virtue is banished, ambition invades the minds of those who are disposed to receive it, and avarice possesses the whole community." Montesquieu (written by Thomas Jefferson in his Common Place Book).

"Liberty . . . is the great parent of science and of virtue; and . . . a nation will be great in both always in proportion as it is free." Thomas Jefferson

"The order of nature [is] that individual happiness shall be inseparable from the practice of virtue." Thomas Jefferson

"Without virtue, happiness cannot be." Thomas Jefferson

"The institution of delegated power implies that there is a portion of virtue and honor among mankind which may be a reasonable foundation of confidence." Alexander Hamilton

"To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea." James Madison

"The aim of every political Constitution, is or ought to be first to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of society; and in the next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous whilst they continue to hold their public trust." James Madison

". . . Virtue, morality, and religion. This is the armor, my friend, and this alone that renders us invincible. These are the tactics we should study. If we lose these, we are conquered, fallen indeed . . . so long as our manners and principles remain sound, there is no danger." Patrick Henry

"Bad men cannot make good citizens. It is when a people forget God that tyrants forge their chains. A vitiated state of morals, a corrupted public conscience, is incompatible with freedom. No free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue; and by a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles." Patrick Henry

"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." John Adams

Now, if you *cannot* accept the conclusions deemed inescapable by the Founders of this nation, then you are most likely one of those people who CANNOT learn, or only learn under the harshest of conditions: Direct Experience.

Step 2: Understand that the events in the past that you have cheered are antithical to virtuous people.

[Maelstrom]

There is far more evidence of unicorns and dragons than of the “noble savage”.

[Maelstrom]

Oh, and the solution relies upon educating people.

The children of today are not being educated. They are being indoctrinated.

They are not being taken down the path of study that answers the question “why”...and teaches them to find the answer to that question, but instead tells them *what* to think.

By way of example I offer the favorite of the Flower Children’s vises: Sex. They are indoctrinated to believe, as it happens, that sex is something they are going to do whether they want to or not, so they might as well give in to those feelings. It’s hormonal, and they are animals...this is the message....Therefore get a condom from the nurse’s office, nevermind the fact that the child is 12 or 13 years of age.

They are also told, beginning in Kindergarten in some cases, that there is no difference between heterosexuality and homosexuality while deftly ignoring that men and women are different, but homosexuality and a plethora of other fetishes and paraphilias have astonishingly *few* differences.

[knarf]

You don’t know me.

[Maelstrom]

If you did not write about yourself, your thoughts, your memories, and were not waxing nostolgic about the immorality of your past...no.

But then, that would beg the question of why you would create such fictions in the first place.

The internet political forums are wonderful places. Stripped away are the superficialities of race, age, appearance, wealth, and all the emotional trappings one encounters in face-to-face meetings. Thus, when you write, you more completely lay bare your thoughts than when you, say, share a coffee at Starbucks in your Berkenstocks.

At least we’ve put the lie to that bit about open minds.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1851750/posts?page=63#63

Ya gone an’ letcher brains drip out...and now your mind is closed to the fact that you were wrong. Everything about that time was wrong, and harmful to the nation.

[livius]

Too true. But those in love with the idea of the noble savage will never admit it.

[knarf]

So, I waxed nostalgic and now, some 40 years later, you in your wisdom and morality can attack a memory as if it is a present day way of life?

Hillary! needs a writer.

[Maelstrom]

Nope, It doesn’t matter 40 years ago, 60 years ago, 100 years ago, 1000 years ago.

That behavior is harmful to the society in which it was engaged.

It’s time to recognize the fact and feel shamed by your actions rather than wax nostalgic about it.

Oh...and please, it’s Mrs. Bill Clinton. She isn’t anybody without Slick Willie.

[knarf]

And your argumentative spirit isn't?

You're cancer.

[Proud_texan]

"And they must have been terrible parents"

Some posit that is not far wrong as many of that generation rejected traditional child raising and opted for Dr. Spock. Up until the time of his book his methods were definately not the norm.

A lot of parents paid attention, it was, after all, a time of science, technology and "modern" methods. His book has only been outsold by the Bible.

Of course blaming ones parents for ones shortcomings is silly but I'm not sure that a lot of that generation think there's any reason to place blame.