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I may be attending my first Rainbow Gathering in New Mexico. I wonder if many locals will be there? I hope there are. I'd like to meet some of the creative folk of the Taos/Santa Fe area.
We ran the creative folk out of here quite some time ago. All we got left are people posing as creative folk, and rich folks promoting the posers in galleries. Santa Fe/Taos got a lot of attention in the 60's when it was a Bohemian paradise. Those days are long gone, although people like to continue to romanticize about it. There probably are still a few of those hippies living around here and Taos, but now they are all probably paranoid folk that remain hidden on their properties and would not be much worth meeting.
I may be attending my first Rainbow Gathering in New Mexico. I wonder if many locals will be there? I hope there are. I'd like to meet some of the creative folk of the Taos/Santa Fe area.
Thanks for the link.
I was invited to one when I lived in another state called the Rainbow Gathering and it was mostly Pagan folks that attended is the reason I asked if this was the same thing.
Lots of crafts, food, drumming and spiritual type things.
The Rainbows are bunch of old and latter-day hippies who gather at some unfortunate spot of public land for purposes of what seems to be reliving of the '60's--complete with free sex, illicit drug use, etc. Unfortunately, they have some pretty disagreeable habits to go along with all of that. Some years back they had their "gathering" in a rural county where I lived. What they brought in economic benefits to the area were far overshadowed by the taxpayer-shouldered costs of their little fun time. The local health and law enforcement agencies had to get supplemental budget appropriated in addition to state taxpayer assistance for all of the additional costs the gathering entailed for those agencies. The Rainbows gathered in a remote area of the National Forest. It took the Forest Service over a year (at taxpayer expense) to repair all the damage caused by the Rainbows. Some of the Rainbows--I think mostly just to prove that they could do it--engaged in numerous acts of repugnant behavior in the local small towns. Things like defecating or fornicating in public in places including town parks, business parking lots, and public sidewalks. Rainbow members also openly used illicit drugs in public places such as city parks, downtown areas--even in front of public library (which was running its summer children's' programs at the time). Nice. A preferred method of bathing was naked in several local self-serve public car washes. Not too many locals complained about that--a lot of the people stunk so bad that it was worth the "view" for the Rainbows to at least clean up some. This particular gathering was supposedly one of the more peaceful ones. There were only a few fights, and only a couple of deaths from drug overdoses. Thanks to the vigilance of the local health department, there were no big outbreaks of food-borne illness at the gathering--though one of the health department folks, a Viet Nam vet, described the scene as trying to run a food service during the Tet Offensive.
So, you New Mexico folks can probably expect much of the same from this bunch. Whatever the '60's were, the Rainbows are pretty much a combination wannabe/has-been version of hippiedom--trying to recapture some moment based on either somebody's fogged up memory of what was, or some idealized dream of it by somebody who never saw the '60's. Lest anybody think these folks are all from the tie-dyed self-imposed poverty, back to the land types, I personally saw people heading to the Rainbow gathering I was witnessing get off of private jets at the local airport, then changing into their "hippie" clothes to hitchhike up to the "festivities." Far out, man . . .
Just FYI, we were in Taos for the last couple days and this is Taos' "Summer of Love"
re-run year. You, too can pretend to be a hippie while having a $7 latte...
How much is the acid, Mr. Natural, orange sunshine, windowpane, blotter?
Oh darn flashbacks!
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