The hippies were wrong!

Cowboy Bob wrote:

This is an absolute hoot! Where are the facts to substantiate these observations. The hippie movement had and has little to do with where the US culture and workplace environment has moved to at the present time. It's a history of Haight-Ashbury,living in filth and squalor and lying around on sidewalks smoking pot and other mind numbing drugs and making a mess of their lives. This was a movement of extreme do nothing, contributing nothing to society and being self abusive. There was nothing constructive about what they did or contributed to society. Don't make it sound any more than what it was. Few hippies became yuppies, most remained a burden on society, not a positive influence for sure....The hippie movement did nothing inspiring....sorry, but your observations are not accurate.

Bob, far be it for me to worship the hippie movement in any way, but if you're going to preface your remarks with "Where are the facts ...", you ought to provide some data of your own.

The OP's attack on hippies is just silly. First of all, politically, they were right about absolutely everything. And the things they did to drag the culture out of the 1960s and make it more ecumenical were all admirable.

Hippies were mainly marijuana and LSD users. The cocaine epidemic that followed was, by and large, not even involving the same people. Trust me, I was there. None of my friends became cokeheads.

Hippies had nothing to with any of the bad aspects of sex that the OP attributes to them. Considering the timeline, blaming them for AIDS is just extremely inaccurate.

I have no desire to whitewash anything, and I'm very glad that 90 percent of hippies moved on to more constructive lives. It's a bit galling and even puzzling to see folks on the right feel the need to rewrite the history of the '60s and early '70s. What's the point?

Where are the facts to substantiate YOUR observations? The hippies didn't just die out or have been living of squalor for the past 50 years. Most of them grew up had kids and made something out of their lives. Very few of the hippies were the stereotypical Haight-Ashbury bum, most were the stereotypical university intellectual. College campus; ever heard of that. Usually pretty liberal place. There was plenty of free love on your ivy league campuses during the 60s and 70s and by the 80s and 90s, those kids who had been part of the hippie movement had moved on to running Fortune 500 companies.

Oh and this all comes from the book "The New Spirit of Capitalism" by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello.

+1

towhee wrote:

I don't know how many letsrunners are old enough to remember the hippies, but it actually was a fairly short-lived phenomenon. It really took off around 1968. My recollection was it really came into full bloom around the time of the release of the Beatles 'Abbey Road' which I looked up and was dated Sept, 1969.

The 'Summer of Love' was the peak of hippiedom and that was 1967. The hippie movement had been going strong for several years before that.

Your memory is terrible. You musta smoked a lot of grass, popped a lotta pills?

Care to back it up with a reference? Every study have I seen has shown that red states tend be much more obese than the blue ones (there are exceptions like CO and MI). Now maybe breaking down individual states by voter would change that trend but I sort of doubt it.Republicans are also more likely to get divorced and be teenaged mothers. But they are happier with thier sex lives. Republican states also tend to be big smokers.Of course this all pretty much correlation and politics is probably not the root cause (religion, education and poverty would be my votes) of most of these things

Get real Uncle Bitch wrote:

UncleB wrote:

7. You don't think that hippies exercised, although they were, on average, far skinnier than the average right wing american is today I assume you would copncede.

Democrats are fatter than Republicans. Look it up.

Do you speed? Should you be punished every time you go 36 in a 35? Like someone said, you have trouble separating legality from morality. How many people die from a maryjane overdose every year? Marijuana poisoning? I have never had any adverse effects from a couple puffs of a joint other than staring at the tv for too long. The argument that something is bad because it is illegal is simply small minded. Make up your own mind on what you think is right and wrong. Stop letting politicians tell you what is right and wrong. If you had kids during the days of slavery, would you tell them that it was okay just because it was legal? If you think yes, then you are too far gone and I am wasting my time trying to school you. In some communities it is a violation to have your house painted a certain color or for your grass to be too long. Is it against the rules and did you choose to live there? Yes! Is it morally wrong? No.

Well from your histrionic post I now understand what conflict you may be having. It seems the problem is deeper that I thought.

You must probe into the depths of your experience for a full understanding.

They have hippie-funded social service programs for such things.

In Vegas last weekend I visisted the Rain Forest Cafe at the MGM and saw a coffee mugs and T-Shirts for sale that read "Peace, Love, and Frogs". Even if the hippies were wrong there is still capitalism movement 40 years or so after Woodstock to profit on that time.

well stated. i thought this immediately when i read the first post.

to towhee, when abbey road was released how old were you, 9?

The real problem is people with fascist attitudes like the OP. "I got mine, screw you. Get out of my way, I'm right, you're wrong."

I know SO MANY right-wingers who follow the EXACT same pattern of thinking. I think the sentiments that these folks have embraced were actually introduced by the Republican party to put the blame on that where it didn't belong, victimizing the victims, all the while shouting for the merits of unrestricted corporate power. For example, blaming illegal immigrants for all our problems, while simultaneously championing a system that depends on the outsourcing of inhumanely cheap labor across our borders, causing those people to come back for the blood sucked out of them through hegemonic trade agreements that keep the 2nd and 3rd world down.

Everyone needs to read 'Confessions of an Economic Hitman' by John Perkins. It illuminates the dark, fascist side of US politics that many people do not want to believe is going on.

You are not very smart, are you?

"Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant." -- H L Mencken, Minority Report (1956)

You're so certain.

Towhee, what state are you from?

[/quote]Where are the facts to substantiate YOUR observations? The hippies didn't just die out or have been living of squalor for the past 50 years. Most of them grew up had kids and made something out of their lives. Very few of the hippies were the stereotypical Haight-Ashbury bum, most were the stereotypical university intellectual. College campus; ever heard of that. Usually pretty liberal place. There was plenty of free love on your ivy league campuses during the 60s and 70s and by the 80s and 90s, those kids who had been part of the hippie movement had moved on to running Fortune 500 companies.

Oh and this all comes from the book "The New Spirit of Capitalism" by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello.[/quote]

You can believe what you want. Hippies were not "college intellectuals" as you might want to believe. They were dropouts, the "lost" children of the late 50's, 60's and early 70's. You are talking about pseudo "hippies" perhaps, those who moved away from the "establishment" of their parents generation and tried to create a new culture for themselves, as most generations try and do. Those individuals moved on with their lives and most became productive members of our society.

Watching Maynard G Krebs from Dobie Gillis doesn't make it real. My facts are that I was there and saw it in person, long before you were born, I am sure. I certainly don't have to rely on some revised history by someone who has an agenda to sell.

Hippies were not college intellectuals, for the most part. Most were actually working at menial jobs.

Woodstock was in August. There were over 500,000 people there. Yet when Hendrix played, last on the bill, and it was well into Monday, only about 20,000 people were there. Why do you suppose that is? School was not in session. They had jobs to get back to.

If McCain has listened to the hippies he wouldn't have had 1,000s of male sex partners for 7 years in Hanoi. That was fun for a Navy Gay boy like him.

Balls wrote:

On the two main issues of the day, civil rights and the war in Vietnam, the hippies were right and the conservatives (of both parties) were wrong.

This.

Edna wrote:

Towhee, what state are you from?

I hail from Washington state. The West suffered disproportionately from the hippie movement since so many of them moved to CA, WA, and OR.

All three of these states now find themselves in a fiscal sewer, and believe it or not, much of the problem can be traced to the hippies. CA was the Golden State; it gave us Ronald Reagan, the microprocessor, etc. 50 years later it is a hellhole. Financial ruin, gun control, etc. Recently I saw a survey that found something like 1 in 3 Californians wanted to move out state.