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Hair styles and sideburns didn't mean anything. Just look at hair styles in the 1800's. What changed, if you were into it was everything. I recall travelling from LA to SF in the mid 60's. You could meet someone on the bus who would invite you to stay for free at a crash pad in SF. People slept on the floor, shared their drugs, wine, food, and bodies with strangers...
Man....did that rekindle some memories! Groovy memories man!
I remember traveling across the States, east to west, in a 1952 GMC motorcoach bus called the "Gray Rabbit" that had "Church of Universal Consciousness" printed on the sides. It would pick up/drop off young folks along the way near I80 NYC - SF & only the first 2 rows of seats were intact, the rest of the bus was a floor covered with mats & sleeping bags. Essentially we had an interstate party at 60mph & made new friends & sometimes lovers. The drivers stayed sober & took turns with a curtained off sleeping cot area in the back. They would vote where to go on a field trip for the better part of a day somewhere in the Rockies.
Once on a visit to Boston from NY to visit some girls, unannounced , they weren't home. We arrived so late after midnight that we parked the car in Cambridge & tried to sleep in it. 3 guys trying to sleep in a VW Bug (painted with flowers & a peace sign) didn't work for me so I wandered around that night & chatted up some other long hair in the park & next thing we were all in a house drinking wine & passing the pipe & playing music till almost dawn with our new friends.
Ah, memories...faint as they are now.
Point being that we were in a moment that we identified in an almost tribal way with the visible other "tribe members" that took the "peace & love" thing seriously. For some it was after a psychedelic experience of the "oneness of all" people & perhaps, creation, while for others it was just good fun. It lasted for a wonderful moment.
First let me say that I'm young and this is before my time. But what exactly set it off? Was it the assassination of JFK? The Vietnam War? I noticed this was a time of self-indulgence, feelings, pleasure, etc. Is all this accurate? Anyone live during this era? What were your experiences? What do you remember most? What's the biggest pro and con of this movement?
It was before my time as well but I have spent literally years going through archived documents, some just recently declassified & I am pretty sure it was a government propaganda campaign.
The bills were drawn up before the marches. They cleverly instigated the unrest, much like they are doing now. Just like now, the problem wasn't coming from "The White House" itself but from key players who were undermining elected officials. Back then, one of them was Henry Kissinger. It was motivated by his & his peers involvement with globalization & population control.
Unfortunately; American youth took the bait; hook, line & sinker & engaged on the great social experiment that was nothing less than societal de-evolution. They found themselves so amazing & novel; the true definition of The Me Generation.
But it worked. I mean, in order to achieve globalization it is much easier to take the first world down a notch while selectively bringing the the third world up to meet in the middle. And that's where we are.
In the 1960s there were 2 groups -the ones that went to war and the ones that were against war
There was stuff I did not like in both groups
Today we have 2 groups
The patriots/ vets aka older folks and the anti American cancel culture people
If the rioters and cancel culture people consider themselves the true patriots -that explains antifa
But not the burning on my town in June
If the "patriots" consider themselves as such, explain the Boogaloo Bois, who were instigating much of the violence across the country? Explain White Supreacist extremists. Izzat what you call patriotism?
I challenge you to define "patriotism" within the context of this discussion.
It was before my time as well but I have spent literally years going through archived documents, some just recently declassified & I am pretty sure it was a government propaganda campaign.
The bills were drawn up before the marches. They cleverly instigated the unrest, much like they are doing now. Just like now, the problem wasn't coming from "The White House" itself but from key players who were undermining elected officials. Back then, one of them was Henry Kissinger. It was motivated by his & his peers involvement with globalization & population control.
Unfortunately; American youth took the bait; hook, line & sinker & engaged on the great social experiment that was nothing less than societal de-evolution. They found themselves so amazing & novel; the true definition of The Me Generation.
But it worked. I mean, in order to achieve globalization it is much easier to take the first world down a notch while selectively bringing the the third world up to meet in the middle. And that's where we are.
It was before my time as well but I have spent literally years going through archived documents, some just recently declassified & I am pretty sure it was a government propaganda campaign.
The bills were drawn up before the marches. They cleverly instigated the unrest, much like they are doing now. Just like now, the problem wasn't coming from "The White House" itself but from key players who were undermining elected officials. Back then, one of them was Henry Kissinger. It was motivated by his & his peers involvement with globalization & population control.
Unfortunately; American youth took the bait; hook, line & sinker & engaged on the great social experiment that was nothing less than societal de-evolution. They found themselves so amazing & novel; the true definition of The Me Generation.
But it worked. I mean, in order to achieve globalization it is much easier to take the first world down a notch while selectively bringing the the third world up to meet in the middle. And that's where we are.
MANY here will disagree. I don't care.
Yes, here we are sixty years later, Henry Kissinger is 97 and probably still drags on a gray business suit every day, not a step closer to that New World Order he strived so avidly for. Why? Maybe he'll tell us in his memoirs. The earth's population has doubled since 1970 and he hasn't been heard from about that either. I wonder if he still talks to Bill Gates every day? It's great to come up with wild theories without a palpable motive. Have you seen the section of City Data dedicated to finding Bigfoot?
It would take someone who wasn't there to cite "instigated unrest" when there was very little, unless you consider peaceful marches of hundreds of thousands for equal rights and an end to war as unrest. Really, who would want to end a war or improve their life? But maybe you're right, maybe we did "de-evolve" before putting those men on the moon, curing deadly diseases and dragging the world, kicking and screaming, into the computer age.
I know you said you don't care what anyone thinks but you may want to look for a new hobby, at least until the world opens all its borders; all that's been accomplished so far is removing one little wall in Germany. It's almost like no one is trying.
One event in the late 60s emerged from the chaos to give people hope and that was the moon landing. Anything seemed possible after Man had landed successfully on the moon.
Yes, those long-haired astronauts were real hippies, didn't have to work and train at all for years and decades with nose to grindstone, they just floated out in space on vibes, no rocket fuel necessary.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sand&Salt
No, we don't all become conservatives. I think that's obvious.
Maybe, but interesting to note that companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon are by now all military contractors, in fact they even sue each other over the awarding of military contracts.
Is it really so obvious?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sand&Salt
But it is surprising how the hippies became so materialistic ...
Sigh. No, we don't all become conservatives. I think that's obvious.
But it is surprising how the hippies became so materialistic and obsessed with parenting....
(our parents mostly ignored us and we loved it)
Did they? What exactly does "so materialistic" mean, exactly? Appreciating having a roof over one's head? Or something more than that? I think people are looking at the hippies, and then looking at the lifestyles of others in that generation who never were hippies, and conflating the two.
They're not looking at the people who started the organic food revolution, and raised their kids on organic farms, making a living selling to local and regional grocers and co-ops, the people who started co-ops in the first place, supporting local organic farmers, people who started the urban farming movement, growing some of their own food in city P-patches and biking to work, all the people who started environmental or social justice non-profit organizations, or worked for them, and so on.
The hippies are still out there, being true to their values. Some of you are just looking for them in the wrong places. You're mistaking former Yuppies for hippies, then calling hippies "so materialistic".
One obvious mistake some people on this thread are making is conflating boomers with hippies. Most boomers, who probably had sideburns & facial hair in the early 1970s & smoked some weed, they weren't hippies, that is countercultural. All hippies were boomers but very few boomers were hippies.
As for the delusional fever dreams & displaced, unresolved anger towards kids during a brief period over a half century ago... says more about others than the actual requested topic. Sad.
Ragging on Henry Kissinger is like biting the hand that feeds you, don't do it. Had Henry never been born, our real salary/purchase power would be 1/4 what it is today, and we'd all be driving around in gremlins and pintos. There would be massive unemployment, no stimulus, no deficit spending to pull us out of recessions. Much more instability in world politics, increased foreign threats from lack of defense spending. I thank Henry Kissinger from the bottom of my heart for his service to our country and Richard Nixon, for negotiations to draw the Vietnam War to a close, to feed the hungry people of Chili with capitalism, to keep the Saudi oil flowing into our thirsty tanks when we needed it the most. When his time has come, I hope he gets a state funeral and 21 gun salute, nobody deserves it more than Henry Kissinger.
Now I want to rag a little bit about the Malvina Reynolds Little Boxes song about the universities, which I heard for the first time about 5 years ago. The sheer irony of it really makes me want to buy a trash compactor. The problem is still the same, in how all the boxes still come out all the same, but now they are all little hippie & commie boxes. These new boxes are much less prepared to enter the workforce. The whole point of the university is to make boxes that work, not flimsy dependent graffiti boxes that catch on fire. The company has no use for these new boxes, I want the old boxes back, they were packed with good stuff. You can listen to the music but don't eat the hippie gumbo, there's always a catch, watch King Of The Hill and learn everything you need to know.
Malvina Reynolds - Little Boxes (I much prefer Deep Purple - Space Truckin)
One obvious mistake some people on this thread are making is conflating boomers with hippies. Most boomers, who probably had sideburns & facial hair in the early 1970s & smoked some weed, they weren't hippies, that is countercultural. All hippies were boomers but very few boomers were hippies.
As for the delusional fever dreams & displaced, unresolved anger towards kids during a brief period over a half century ago... says more about others than the actual requested topic. Sad.
Yes, by the early 1970s it was just about all over. A counter culture had emerged but the real hippies were "dead." The good that they had tried to bring about was being attacked and hijacked by others. The hippies didn't last that long. I think their peaceful protests and their ideas about being more kind, preserving the environment, becoming more self sufficient and less materialistic, and ending the war did bring about some improvements in America, but not as much as they had desired. Call their dreams naive; maybe they were.
It was the hippies in the late '60s singing, "One two three, what are we fighting for? Don't know, I don't give a d___, Next stop is Viet Nam. Five six seven open up the pearly gates. Well, there ain't no time to wonder why. Whoopie! We're all gonna die."
or "How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?
.....and how many times must the cannonballs fly before they're forever banned"
These rather sad and prophetic songs were like the hymns of the hippies. All Hell broke loose after that but the true hippie era was over. EARLY Boomers, born right after WWII=hippies.
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, they weren't home. We arrived so late after midnight that we parked the car in Cambridge & tried to sleep in it. 3 guys trying to sleep in a VW Bug (painted with flowers & a peace sign) didn't work for me so I wandered around that night & chatted up some other long hair in the park & next thing we were all in a house drinking wine & passing the pipe & playing music till almost dawn with our new friends.
