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My parents were a touch older (think Korea instead of Vietnam) and I thank God for that every time I meet a self proclaimed former hippie .
I was the youngest in my family so that put me (in my teen years) smack dab in school and friendships with the children of that oh so self indulgent group.
The multiple divorces, the affairs, lazy business practices and numerous bankruptcies. No you shouldn't try to be friends with your kids and their friends. No you shouldn't smoke pot with your kids. No you shouldn't be trying to get your kids to try to be less concerned about money, status and security when you are still getting a stipend from your elderly parents and driving a mercedes.
I remember sitting around with some friends in the early 80's drinking beer, listening to punk and trying to help a buddy who's flower child mom had just cheerfully announced her third divorce to him that morning and that it was a good thing because she would be "free" again to follow her hearts path.
I think the late 70s and 80s helped me develop my intense hatred of hypocrisy.
So many pages in such a short time! Amazing...
Seriously I had to check reading your OP if I had written it months
ago and forgot!
I just didn't go to Europe till '77.
Every other wild thing I did here in the US ...started in '69 for me.
(Our ride to Woodstock left without us, because the car got full with
others that showed up.... Disappointed!!!....went to Newport Jazz Fest
instead that year.)
My brother in law is in many photos, tho of Woodstock.
I'm still pretty much a wild woman....2 years ago was going to sell my house and buy in the Downtown Art District of Las Vegas, btw...had my realtor there.
But, then a friend gave me $100,000 to pay off my mortgage...so
I stayed here in the CO Rockies....but I still may do it!
I have a pull to the desert...and people don't know about the 'other' side of LV...I do!
Yeah.. if you didn't get drafted. I personally like the early seventy's after Nam. I actually liked about all of my years until 08.
Forces beyond my control really screwed things up. I lost almost everything. The bankers and wall street haven't learned anything or really changed. I recommend you all get ready for really tough times. The coming financial collapse will be horrible.
Any real look at the numbers put out by the government, tell us they are a lie. Just wake up. Go for a drive and look around.
All those empty warehouses and commercial buildings. No jobs in the paper. Do you see a 17000 economy?
Anyhow,those that retired already and have some money. Your dam lucky. Your kids and grandchildren. Not so much. Talk to them and tell them to prepare for whats coming. Help them out if you can. Get out of big city's. A future violent prison of sorts.
Try this site. TheBurningPlatform check it out for a week. Tell your kids to also. Learn some truths.
I hear you loud and clear...I am a preparer or survivalist and tell my friends
to please stop being so wasteful...save....collect wood, get a wood stove at least....you
have no idea what may happen.
I am a positive person...but I'm not stupid...I see
what's happening in the world...a collapse of some kind...looks it to me...
I know all about '08.
But here's an indicator that perhaps I do wish I had "indulged" a little more at the time.
Now retired and on Medicare, a group of us are planning a trip to Colorado
next summer. Guess why . . .
The recreational pot? Haha. Too bad they tax it so much...I have so much from
my legal plants I don't know what to do with it!
Many of my friends are that way.
Contact me when you get close.
Bear in mind, Dave, worth repeating, the hippie culture was largely a middle class phenomena. Many of the poor were working, just to survive, and didn't have the luxury of running off to Europe and backpacking around for a month or 2.
The woman, mentioned, was a middle class woman who just wanted to spread her wings for 6 months and enjoy the party, influenced by all the publicity at the time. Have no idea what happened to her, but she may have just tired of it all quickly and returned home.
Way, way back there was a similar movement, out of Italy, centuries ago. I learned of that when I was visiting Meteora, in Greece, with all those hilltop monasteries. My guide compared that phenomena to the hippie movement, centuries later.
Rich kids, dropping out of upper class life in Italy at the time, and building all those hilltop monasteries, and who knows if they did any praying?
It will be interesting to see if a movement, like this, re-occurs at some point in time, started by disenchanted rich kids from Silicon Valley?
Yes! It's a creative (and destructive?) youth thing. Puts me in mind of 1816 when Jon Polidori, Percy Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and Lord Byron spent some time in Lake Geneva, Switzerland. They all went off to be what we'd call "Goths" and experimented with laughing gas compliments of Byron's doctor who accompanied them. And out of that mini-movement came some pretty interesting literature not the least of which was little sixteen-year-old Mary's Frankenstein.
And then there was the Bohemian youth culture of France in the 19th century. The opera La Boheme, by Giacomo Puccini, was written about that.
What happened to you Anti war types? America has been in war in the Middle East just about as long as the Vietnam war. Hundreds of thousands of civilians have been killed by our weapons in American soldiers hands, and all this has been a big recruiter for terrorists. We have to stop this world cop business.
Don't you have them in Phoenix? Ours protest outside the local post office once a week, a group of nuns, leftovers from the Sixties, and various odds and ends of people from all classes.
I'm only 45, so I was born in 1969 and didn't experience any of the lives you guys are talking about.
But in high school I became OBSESSED with the 1960s and read books (Ken Kesey, Aldous Huxley, etc.), listened to the music and basically became a bit of a hippie in 1985-87. Then I went to college and was introduced to industrial music and became a goth for 3 years. Then I graduated and was introduced to techno music and became a raver for 7 years before I got married and stopped all of that.
Anyway, in college I was still enamored with the hippie culture and ended up writing my 100-page thesis on the youth culture of the 1960s as part of my Liberal Arts major.
I consider my "show" days to be my years in the rave culture. It was AMAZING. I spent seven years going to clubs 3x a week in the DC/Baltimore area and then traveling the east coast on the weekends to go to raves anywhere from Rhode Island to North Carolina. The early rave days were very reminiscent of what I believe the hippie days to be. Unfortunately, raves now are a far cry from what they were in the early 1990s...
If you haven't run into it yet, Girl, here's a book about the cultural influence of the Sixties that I found interesting:
Not to be mistaken with the book about alternative medicine by the same name.
My forty-one year-old daughter has been a new-age hippie since her early twenties. She's a hard-working, community service type hippie I'd say. Dresses like a gypsy. For years she traveled with the band PHISH and cooked vegetarian soups for sale to finance her travel.
Now she sells hand-made jewelry and hippie clothing online, volunteers in a food shelf, cooks for a local restaurant, caters, and is a private chef for a pair of doctors and their family. Some young people just need that freedom of variety, I think.
I am less apt to call it a middle-class thing than the sort of lifestyle which beckons to creative types. And therein lies that self-destructive streak we notice. Some push it to the limit.
I was still either a child or an adolescent in the '60's ... so I missed out on the wilder stuff. Although when I was about 13 or 14 I and a classmate and friend of mine used to hang out in a large park in Miami (called Greynold's Park) that had a lake and the hippies would gather there en masse on the weekends. It was sort of a "love in" with a real Indian guru/yogi chanting and sticks of incense everywhere (to cover the smell of pot I guess). It was great fun.
High School and college was the Disco '70's. I had fabulous outfits (I was working and had spending money and my brother's best friend's Dad owned a great clothing store). Shiny print shirts. Dancing shoes. Gold chain on my neck. Also, super tight pants ... now, that was sexy! The era of Donna Summer, Gloria Gaynor, Barry White, KC and the Sunshine Band, Carol Douglas, Disco Tex & The Sex-o-lettes, etc.
I refused to do drugs. I indulged in only a little drinking. I was a "nice" well groomed law abiding young man. However ... sex ... well that was another story!
That was before AIDS came along. At that point, genital herpes was the most scary STD one could get, as the others were curable with antibiotic therapy.
My parents were a touch older (think Korea instead of Vietnam) and I thank God for that every time I meet a self proclaimed former hippie .
I was the youngest in my family so that put me (in my teen years) smack dab in school and friendships with the children of that oh so self indulgent group.
The multiple divorces, the affairs, lazy business practices and numerous bankruptcies. No you shouldn't try to be friends with your kids and their friends. No you shouldn't smoke pot with your kids. No you shouldn't be trying to get your kids to try to be less concerned about money, status and security when you are still getting a stipend from your elderly parents and driving a mercedes.
I remember sitting around with some friends in the early 80's drinking beer, listening to punk and trying to help a buddy who's flower child mom had just cheerfully announced her third divorce to him that morning and that it was a good thing because she would be "free" again to follow her hearts path.
I think the late 70s and 80s helped me develop my intense hatred of hypocrisy.
There may be too many generalizations in this post.
And then there was the Bohemian youth culture of France in the 19th century. The opera La Boheme, by Giacomo Puccini, was written about that.
Not to go off track here, just a quick aside...last night at our local theater was a showing of La Boheme at the Sydney Opera House in Australia, 2011. Was that ever an amazing production. The lives of starving artists in Paris in the 19th Century (soprano Takesha Meshe Kizart as Mimi, and tenor Ji-Min Park as Rodolfo—terrific, though they weren't big names). Puccini was a real madman, artistically speaking. These were youth with an artistic cause.
What also comes to mind is the youth culture in revolutionary France (Les Mis)...youth trying to make the world a better place as they do in many different cultures of the world, laying down their lives for justice, only get trounced by the powers that be. Flower children should not be confused with those youth movements.
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