Tag: hippies

July 4th weekend, 1993

A little background:  On Wednesday, June 30, one of my students (named Rachel) suggested that I might be interested in attending the Rainbow Gathering near Mount Victory, Kentucky.  The Rainbow Family is a collection of assorted people, loosely categorized as “hippies” that have been meeting at a US national park for the last 22 years [+21–ed] in order to commune with nature, to seek self‑healing, and to try to join their energies in quest for world peace, social harmony, and ecological balance (and maybe get stoned a bit also 🙂 ).  

This is a part of my auto-biographical thingy…

Hunter S. Thompson revised 2009

The hippies Wingnuts, who had never really believed they were the wave of the future anyway, saw the election results as brutal confirmation of the futility of fighting the establishment on its own terms by stealing elections and voter suppression.

There had to be a whole new scene, they said, and the only way to do it was to make the big move – either figuratively or literally –

from Berkeley to the Haight-Ashbury cognitive dissonance to sheer lunacy, from pragmatism to mysticism, from politics propaganda to dope violence…

The thrust is no longer for “change obscene wealth” or “progress retrogression” or “revolution blind obedience,” but merely to escape enslave, to live on the far far right perimeter of a world that might have been they do not understand.

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This diary grew out of a comment in The Dream Before the Awakening.  The comment was:

Do we really need more hippies?

You can shut out the world for the sake of achieving inner peace or whatever. It’s crazy to pretend, though, that if you get others to join you, the fundamental problems facing our future will go away.

I want to ask people to get engineering degrees, to become doctors, to learn the law, to learn about climate science – and to use this information to do good. Iin this world we need more Jane Goodalls and Barack Obamas, not George Harrisons.

In a thread yesterday over at the GOS, somebody blamed 60s era hippies for the mess we’re in today (again).  Nothing could be further from the truth in my opinion.  We did not win the culture wars in the 60s, we lost.  It wasn’t us that ended up running things, it was the other side, the Nixonites.  The neocons are direct descendants of said rightwingers (they did NOT descend from the hippies).  There was no point where the evil rightwing bastards turned things over to the hippies either.  That hippies are somehow responsible for the trashing of America is a rightwing-inspired urban myth.  They do that a lot, it takes the heat off of them.

If the hippies had won that struggle back in the 60s we’d live in a more humane world today.