“Hippy” seems to be a derogatory term these days.
And I can’t really work out why.
I’m generations too long to have been at the height of that culture, but from everything I’ve seen and heard about it, it looks like it was amazing.
Maybe it’s been romanticized, I’m not sure. But it seemed like a time where young people, people full of both inner and outer beauty, seemed to jump up out of nowhere and there was this fantastic energy and appreciation of life that hadn’t been seen before ever, and it was there from and for everyone who got involved. It was a feeling of anything was possible with little judgement and acceptance was a lot more rife.
Reading that back, it all seems a little too good to be true, a little euphoric and a utopia that doesn’t really set it straight. But, the aims were positive and the values that were held by it were great. They looked past the mundane and the unnecessary in life and focused on love, peace. A massive group of people fighting for something good and decent.
Nowadays, people are called ‘hippies’ for being overemotional about things, as if being passionate, always loving and insightful about this one life we have, this one incredible and beautiful life, is a bad thing. “Get a job.” Mmm. Right. Valid point, but once again…why is appreciating life and grabbing it by the horns a bad thing? Why should you get a job that you hate, that helps noone, just because everyone tells you to? Get a job, but by God make it a good one. One that helps others, not spunking it away in Tescos making a till go ‘beep’.
I think the ideals of that movement in the 1970s have also dissolved, seeped away, and it can be seen in so many ways. People don’t ally together over something anymore, and the feeling of being alienated is gone. People just don’t commit to things anymore. My example as such being Kony 2012…how many of us went and did that ‘Cover the Night’ thing? Furthermore - and myself being included in this, I will admit - how many of us questioned it and were critical? We’ve become so different, so much more individualistic and yet at the same time so scared of making a mass change to this life together, that something like what happened then won’t be repeated.
Which is a shame, because it needs to be. I feel sometimes that there needs to be another ‘rise of the hippy’ movement, a kind of brilliant counterculture that embodies values we can all support because they’re so fundamental to everything we are, despite our differences on a more superficial scale. But it probably won’t. We’re all too busy being on Facebook.
While I rant and rave about the perfection of it all, nothing sums it up better than this quote…
Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run … but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant… .
History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.
My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder’s jacket … booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) … but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that… .
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda… . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning… .
And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave… .
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
