Where have all the hippies gone: a poll for hippies past and present

Growing up in the '60s and early '70s one could hardly avoid knowledge of the Hippie movement.

Profound and silly, angry and loving, passionate and thoughtful, for many the Hippie movement left deep impressions. For others, it was a fad.

There can be no doubt that those who grew up then are of age to be in charge now. But looking around it isn't hard to see that this is -not- Hippie Heaven.

There is lots of room for discussion about what the Hippie movement was, what happened to it, what long-term influences (if any) society in general has inherited? I hope we can do that here.

What I'd like to ask the -Hippies- (past and present) is: what happened?

that you make."

:hippie:

...and thanks for that great pic of the Fab Four, brings back good memories.

So why do you think the Hippies didn't make a bigger dent in the Establishment? With the RW controlling House, Senate and WH, what happened?

After the 1960's there was a calucated effort from the right to kill the counterculture movement. They weren't about to let what happened during Nixon occur again. It started with the coopting of the music and the war on drugs.

I was amazed at Reagan’s ability to deceive with a smile and warm words. People I trusted and who I was certain knew better were buying into “Morning In America”. I was mystified. As the 80’s matured, I began to realize my first impressions were right. They did know better. They just wanted a piece of the action, and Reagan was a very comfy chair to settle into for that rightward, all expense paid cruise.

It was easy to become establishment. It paid well, opened doors and was pretty hip at the time. You have to give the GOP and conservative movement credit. They had a well oiled, attractive political machine and social movement in place less than 10 years after utter defeat in the 1970s. It was “cool” to be a greedy republican by the end of the decade.

That should have been a red alarm to every political progressive from the former era but most were in line waiting to see “Wall Street” or “Top Gun”. Those same people were seeing films like “Kramer vs. Kramer”, “Apocalypse Now” & “Raging Bull” less than 10 years before.

Progressives had a long dark night during Reagan. The party was essentially invisible. Alone and in the dark, it’s not hard to see why people were convinced to get in line. Well funded think tanks pumped out quality propaganda that yielded immediate results. “Do your own thing” became corrupted to “I got mine” and proved to be a toxic mix with RW radio. More poison for the body politic. Now the patient was going septic

Conservatives fed at the trough provided for them and liberals not ready to get in line for the crumbs were left to become the shrunken runts of the litter. This country, like a bull with a ring through its nose, was pulled to the right despite it preference to lean leftward. Strauss’s revenge. Before my eyes, students went from reading Ginsburg to Rand.

Why? It’s easy to understand now. Dead bodies stink, you see. And the Democratic Party was starting to get quite ripe. Easy pickings for the vultures on the DLC as the decade came to an end. For all his shortcomings, Clinton was quite a reprieve and given the circumstances was more than could have been hoped for. He and the barn-door eared Ross Perot threw the right wing into such a rage they never really recovered, and the newer more virulent form of republicanism stepped into the void. That pretty much brings us to where we are today; at the cliff's edge, looking into the abyss.

...Watergate, the end of the VN war, pardon for the draft dodgers and an end to conscription.

It was a tremendous catharsis for the left to see all of that.

And I tend to think it separated the political activists from their base support.

One of the more obvious symptoms in the latter '70s was the change in music. Folk surged forward while Rock took a back seat. The messages of anger and social conscience weren't nearly as numerous. We'd won the 'war'.

And didn't it hurt that so many hippies were leaving university/college for jobs? The solidarity with a cause that one could feel in student protests didn't exist when applying for a job. Long hair didn't feed a family. Flower power didn't get a job.

One by one we got picked off as we entered the work-force.

How many supported the cause and how many supported the cause -just- to avoid the draft (or get laid, or get high, or some other purely personal motive)?

If progressives had the same support network in place that conservatives enjoyed, things would be very different today. After the events you outlined above - there was nothing but ridicule for the people who shaped and brought progressives to victory in politics and to the cutting edge of culture.

Instead of being embraced by those living off the benefits of a society the counterculture helped to define and create, they were marginalized and cut out of the picture top to bottom. While the GOP was doing everything it could to sweep up fresh talent, the Dem Party became an insider's paradise virtually impossible to participate in other than writing checks. This is still true today, to a lesser extent.

The counterculture saved this country, and it has never stopped paying the price for that. The left forgot about the culture war, but the right made it a crusade. What we are experiencing today is a direct result of forgetting who our friends are so we could sit in the bosses Mercedes whenever we wanted.

I was reading his "Rules for Radicals" (probably for the first time in over 25 years). He makes a lot more sense to me now than he did then: life experience is certainly an essential ingredient.

One of the things he talked about was the need to pass on the torch. To train activists who can take over the mission, be it in their area or on a larger scale.

If ever there was a need for that knowledge, now is the time. I look out at a floundering LW movement, good in heart (for the most part) but ignorant of strategy and to some extent tactics.

The difference between RW recruitment and LW recruitment is a matter of basics.

The RW is corporate, team-oriented. The LW is personal, vision-oriented.

The RW says "this is what we have", the LW says "this is the way it should be".

RW pragmatism dictates sewing up the talent. Not only do they benefit, but they deny their opposition the opportunity to use that talent against them.

LW idealism says "I have a dream..." and we look for those who share it.

The RW is authoritarian, hierarchical. The LW is free-spirited, egalitarian.

Consider the institutions in our society:

- military, public schools, businesses, law enforcement and the justice system are authoritarian and hierarchical.
- most colleges and universities are far more free-spirited and egalitarian.

Not much has changed since the '60s. Yes, we've obtained more civil rights for some groups of peoples, but the basic need to persecute continues with new targets: the GLBT community, Arabs, the French... that persecution continues along ideological grounds as well as morphological indicates a worsening of the damage done to our society.

Our institutions, especially the ones we are most likely to encounter and depend upon, are authoritarian and hierarchical. To survive in these institutions we must adapt our thinking to one that works within such a system. Thus we are trained to obey authority.

Gradually we start giving up the vision and accepting the way things are: perfect fodder for the RW.

With a society 'designed' to accomplish this goal, where do we get the LW?

The LW are malcontents, refusing to obey authority without question. We've -always- been malcontents.

Do you recall the quote that goes something like "some people look at the world and ask 'why'. he looked at the world and said 'why not'" I can never recall whether it was Teddy or Bobby who said that. It is -the- defining statement about the LW.

We ask "why not?". We refuse to accept things as they are. We insist the world evolve, society adapt to new knowledge and ancient wisdom.

We are anti-authoritarians. The whole youth movement of the '60s hammered that point over and over again. We have an almost in-built distrust for authority, because it was and still is so badly abused over and over again.

It is our nature that makes it so difficult to recruit others, or to trust them with responsibility.

It's an unfortunate legacy from the '60s. We don't want to seize control because we might learn to like it too much. We don't want anyone having control for too long because they might learn to like it. Power/control is more like a curse for us rather than a blessing.

Oh, it's not that we don't -personally- want to have control. We know we can trust ourselves with power. It's everyone else that worries us ;-)

That's our free-spirit. And we'd probably get nowhere if that was all there is to us.

But we're more than free-spirited. We're compassionate. We see people suffer and we want to help. We find an abandoned kitten and we take it in. It is along the lines of compassion that we find our common ground.

We all wanted to help the victims of Katrina, of the Indonesian Tsunami, the earthquake victims in Pakistan. Look how we all pull together when faced with people who need our help.

Who are we helping now? We knew who we were helping in the '60s and '70s: all those kids who were going to be forced into war and all those african-americans forced to live in ghettos and slums and kept from voting. We were fighting to help women live lives with dignity and without state intervention. And some of us were fighting for the GLBT community's dignity and civil rights.

Forty years later and we're -still- fighting for the GLBT, not much has changed for them (in America, we've won more battles here in Canada).

Who -should- we be fighting for:

- the GLBT community. Without a doubt they've been denied far too long. Even MLK felt the need to drop them from his coalition. We need to make good the promise of freedom and equality for them.

- the poor. After Katrina, this should be an obvious choice. New Orleans is not the only city in America where stratification would lead to the deaths of the poor in a disaster. New Orleans revealed the depths of a society that ignores its poor far too much until -after- disaster has struck.

- education. Perhaps the single most important ingredient to escape the cycle of poverty and crime. But continuing to use the authoritarian paradigm is not going to produce many sympathetic to the LW. We need to encourage the development of new models of secular education that encourage both a free-spirit and compassion, as well as transform existing models to do the same. We need to establish that it is unacceptable that any child should fail to be educated to their full potential. We also need to recognize that the more we isolate a child from his or her parents, the less influence those parents have over their child. We are approaching a 'hands-off' attitude towards raising children. Parents don't spend enought ime with them, educators lack the authority to address behavioural difficulties except in very limited ways.

I do not favour turning educators into surrogate parents. But unless we rationalize our society such that parents can actually parent, we will end up with a 'hands-off' culture that fails to address behavioural difficulties until such time as LE must get involved.

Parenting and education must intersect and cooperate, and with the current paradigm there are very few interesection points and little cooperation.

According to the U.S. Mayors 68th conference (2000), "many cities" see more than 50% of the black and hispanic students drop out of school. The tired paradigm of blaming the parents and the kids doesn't solve the problem of educating the kids. The parents need our help supporting alternatives that successfully educate their kids.

I agree that the LW does not do enough to recruit the talent it needs to take its message to the people. I think the LW gets too involved in the egotism of their personal visions that they forget whomever wins the primary has to face the opposition. The more we damage that candidate in the primary, the weaker he or she is in the election. The primaries need to be a battle of visions, not a mud-fest. Candidates shouldn't even comment on each other's platform, except perhaps the more liberal response "I hope people listen to all of us and vote for the one who best represents their hopes and dreams for America".

There must be a single-minded committment to the free-spirited, egalitarian compassion in all of us. A willingness to listen to everyone and draw the best from wherever it comes, even the opposition if that be the case.

"Camelot" was an apt choice of imagery for JFK. We need a round table where there is no king, only equals.

And no one does that better than us.

In a disaster like Katrina there is no room for ego. We face a far greater disaster: the success of authoritarianism in America. From that stems all evil and ultimately the destruction of freedom world-wide.

We need to pull together, light the torches of every LW activist and everyone who wants to be. There's more at stake than just America. There's a world to save from an American Empire.

(edit: typo)

Marijuana & the occasional psychedelic were replaced by cocaine. Not for everyone--but there was a significant change. Marijuana was cheap & so were most psychedelics. (Mushrooms are free.) And they fostered a laid-back, peaceful lifestyle. Again, not for everyone. Too many psychedelics can turn the brains to mush--temporarily for some, permanently for a few.

Cocaine is expensive & gives you energy. Unless you run out. Some turned to crime to afford it--others got more corporate. That's where you get the BIG money.

And the big-time coke dealers had more guns that the friendly neighborhood pot-seller.

Coke is the ideal capitalist drug.

I tend to see it as a symptom.

I'm reminded of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers oft-repeated wisdom:

"Dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope".

There was a very laid back feeling about the drug culture. So why would people get themselves hooked onto something like Coke?

Old style hippies didn't spend a lot of money in the dominant economy. We got a lot of our threads at used shops, didn't buy new cars, threw a lot of our cash into the underground economy which was very small time. Head shops and hip clothing stores got by at best but were cool places to hang out. I watched this change as glitter rock/disco hit the scene, people who were just hippie stylin' jumped to the next thing and next thing you know everything just seemed to get cheezy. I know it's irrational but I've always blamed the decline of the hip culture of the 60's(which ended in 72) on disco, which put more money in the pockets of the dominant culture, not to mention coke dealers. Just a coincidence, I suppose.:shrug:

It was big music & biz taking back control of the format and distribution. Disco was much easier to control as a medium, or at least it was at the beginning. Then HipHop and similar came along and much the same started to happen again, so they switched to pop.

Eventually, corporate rock/pop became so controlled that the performers were pretty much interchangeable, and you reach the mainstream music we 'enjoy' today. This started to happen around the time of "Milli Vanilli".

...I was thinking of this earlier too.

it explains why coke became popular: gave you energy for the dance floor.

But I think this too was more a symptom of the disconnect between activists and their base.

As you said "people who were just hippie stylin' jumped to the next thing and next thing".

But that makes me wonder how many fit that category as opposed to those who were committed to the cause.

It was something mentioned in old blues songs. A friend called it "the White Queen of drugs." Then it seemed to be everywhere & quickly lost it's mystique.

And it appealed to some who'd never really been part of the drug culture. Yes, young Georgie tried LSD but he didn't like it. (I heard this from a now-deceased friend--Houston is not that big a town.) Purely by conjecture, coke probably made Georgie much more sure of himself.

Not that everyone took the bait. Being on the music scene, I accepted the occasional rail. But I never wanted to fit it into my entertainment budget.

And it's not a mistake that it replaced the mind expanding diversions of the decade before. Let's not forget how key the CIA was to the cocaine traffic of that time, and perhaps even today. It was the gift that kept on giving to the RW.

They love snorting it, they love selling it, they love what it does to people, they love what it does to Central and South American governments, they love what it did to the counterculture and they love the laws they were able to pass because of it. It's GOP white gold, and they have a poster boy for the snort set sitting on the golden throne now. It's like manna from their twisted version of heaven.

without thinking twice. Just one example: through the 1950's, segregation of blacks, women, and Jews in housing, schooling, and work. This was everywhere and totally accepted in our culture. Blacks and women were considered a sub-species of humans only capable of pushing brooms and cleaning sinks. There were religious quotas at boarding schools and private universities and restricted areas to live. And there is no draft....yet. They haven't undone all our work.

...but the Patriot Act is hardly LW/Hippie-inspired. RW Congress, Senate, WH, and soon SCOTUS is hardly what we fought for in the '60s and '70s. Roe vs Wade may yet be reversed. A war of agression in Iraq. People dying in New Orleans.

All of this is counter-counterculture. And the Hippies are old enough to be in power, passing the laws, refusing to go to war...

What went wrong? RTP's analysis? Something else?

Many Americans wouldn't recognize the US of the 1950's. Far from finding it a golden age, they would be half choked by the repression and cultural vapidity surrounding them. The images of that time we see today are almost all derived from television.

Hippies made it plain: give us clean food, and take your corporate GE, Chem0-Soaked Food Product and stick it down your own gullet.

...claiming there were no "unbiased" reports on the health impact of drinking ground water laced with the stuff.

I pointed out that taking "no position" was the same as taking a position favouring the use of both and allowing it to seep into the ground water (most everyone out here is on a well).

I suggested that since they seem to doubt that there is any health risk, they mix some into a glass of water and drink it, just to show us their confidence.

Needless to say, they never took me up on their offer, but pregnant women and children and the rest of us still drink the ground water, treated with whatever equipment we can afford.

...I'm surprised to hear some of it in the grocery store: mood music the way muzak was mood 'music' years ago.

But being a Hippie was more than music (for some of us, anyway).

But all I can say is that the song's from that era now sell cars(and other items) in TV commercials. Like Thatcher said, "there is no alternative". That whole era's meaning is lost. Protesting isn't all that "new", so power has learned that it can simply ignore those events, and keep doing what they want to do. Or, like the songs of days gone by, incorporate the protests into something they want to sell to the masses.

...but you'd be about the right age to have Hippie parents. Were they Hippies?

They weren't a Hippies Hippie though.

...can you give us your definition for "hippie" and where your parents differed?

We need you in this discussion.

Okay, I respect the right of privacy.

We'd be most fortunate to learn of your experience and insights, if you care to share them.

Please :-)

but I was certainly influenced by the 60's and the need for social change. I think the hippie spirit is alive and growing, very gently. Hippies as a group, were mostly middle class white people, and they went on to try to have families and make money. I have found that many African-Americans or Hispanics don't relate at all to "hippies". So where is the feeling of community?

Just a few meandering thoughts.

Democrats, or growing up to be registered as such. No one goes to church although we are all spiritual. We are against war and wouldn't be caught dead in a walmart. Maybe it is because we had no credit cards back then and no debt, we were more able to live free and not worry so much. Anyway, it is time for the younger generation to organize the giant marches and we will be there, promise.

and what if they don't know how? Or don't know that they can? Or look to our example and ask "what difference will it make"?

Don't get me wrong, I'm in total agreement. But the social environment is very different now to what it was in '65 or even '70.

How many metal detectors were installed back then?

It was just of a decidedly more militant flavor. It's a lesson the rest of the counterculture should have embraced more completely.

were part of the counter culture, the Black Panthers, and such, and there are leaders such as Jessie Jackson today. But where are the counter-culture African-Americans now? Isn't it about style and rap music now?

When will we ever learn - when will we ever learn?

:)

Every time I turn on the TV it's always the same old tease
See everything you ever dreamed that you could want
But nothing that you need
And every gorgeous girl in Hollywood could soon be mine
I got the money and from time to time I have the time

Get the image right
Party through the night
But as it's getting light
I'm still waiting for a soul kiss
Do I have to say please
And it's always just a near miss
Always just a big tease
Is it always gonna be like this
When you're lookin' for a soul kiss

And all the record stores
Are filled with pretty boys and their material girls
And even students vote for actors
Then they tell you it's a safer world
And all the hippies work for IBM or take control
Of faster ways to sell you food that isn't really whole

I like to wine and dine
You sure are lookin' fine
And we could kill some time
But I'm looking for a soul kiss
I've even said please
But it's always just a near miss
Always just a big tease
Is it always gonna be like this
When you're lookin' for a soul kiss

And if you can't live in peace, live in a place that can be well-defended.

I'm a second-generation hippie. My parents were O.H. and they raised me on tofu and Baba Ram Dass. Of course, dear old dad was a tinfoil-hat-wearing back-to-nature home-growin' survivalist who talked about bringing peace to the world, but kept a shotgun over the door.

... Forgive me, but I'm unfamiliar with "O.H.". Tofu and Dass I know :-)

Have you had any conversations with them about how much things have changed and why? Anything you can pass on?

Weren't really freaks, but going along with a popular movement. I think alot of people are doing that today with the rightwing movement. In other words, they're "moderates" who want to be on the winning side. When being a Liberal becomes "cool" again, alot of these people will swing our way.

...doesn't become "cool" on its own, though.

here in New England. Vermont has its share, as does MA, and even back-water towns along the NY border can usually rustle up a few tie-dyed potters and woodworkers.

I was a bit young, more a teeny-bopper pretend Hippie, but made it to Woodstock at the tender age which is at present enjoyed by my son, and if you think he's going any place like it, think again.;^)

We should remember that hippies themselves were a small part of a larger cultural revolution. The people who pushed through civil rights legislation were Harvard trained lawyers in dull suits. The early idealism of the hippie "movement" fell swiftly into a gritty urban street life. And face it, a lot of grungy screw-ups tagged along to take advantage of the drugs and sex. Ringo Starr reports that The Beatles were terribly bored with the drugged out kids of San Francisco who sat around in the Park.

I think it is well to have jettisoned some of the embarrassing details -- the clothes and hair and talk -- but wish we'd managed to retain more of the spirit, the rebelliousness if nothing else. We did enjoy a short time when reality kept its distance and the world seemed a more promising place.

"You said you'd never compromise
With the mystery tramp, but now you realize
He's not selling any alibis
As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes
And ask him, "Do you want to make a deal?"

-- Bob Dylan, Like a Rolling Stone

...walking off cliffs, oblivious to danger, seeking their dreams.

They epitomized the pursuit of happiness, freedom, liberty.

It was a very seductive message, a lot of people could share in that dream.