The hippies were spiritual people who believed in peace and love. The parents of the hippies were born during the Roaring Twenties and the youngest of their children came along just after the "Summer of Love." During the middle of the twentieth century, most hippies migrated to the western coast of North America, because they heard other hippies were gathering there to party. Some hippy clans migrated to New Mexico, Montana, Toronto, India or Europe.
The hippies smoked pot, dressed in colorful clothing and performed tribal rituals, such as staring into candles. Many drove Volkswagens. Although statistically a minority of the population, they left their mark in the 1960s when they introduced the ecology movement, now a mainstream concept (environmentalism). What we now know as organic vegetarian food and natural health care are remnants of their civilization.
Unfortunately, true hippy culture disappeared in 1970 when hippies got into "hard drugs," which they mistook for "hard rock." Many died or became poverty stricken. Some converted to "yuppie-ism," while others went into hiding. Refugee hippies followed the Grateful Dead and Rainbow Family nomadic tribes. These modern hippies are vastly different from their suburban ancestors, who often lived in comfy homes with color TVs.
Mainstream culture still honors the memory of the original hippies with events like the anniversary of Woodstock, but true hippy civilization is lost. Occasionally a hippy reincarnates into an ordinary family. Parents of hippies are encouraged to accept and nurture their hippy children, and help them find what they are looking for on their spiritual quest.
According to astrologers, characteristics of the generations are related to slow moving planets such as Pluto, Neptune and Uranus. Neptune spends about fourteen years in each sign. When the Flower Children were born, Neptune was in Libra, which is associated with harmony, peace and love. Next it moved into Virgo, and a generation of practical, critical people who were generally dubbed x'ers. Neptune is now in Aquarius.
The flag of the hippie kingdom is the tie dye. Even more sacred to some is the tie dye with peace sign in white. It's okay with us if someone wears our flag as clothing or even if an old tie dye cloth is used for mopping, since we consider cleanliness next to godliness (despite stereotypes to the contrary). So please feel free to display our flag.
Another unfounded accusation against hippy culture is that hippies are snobby and will not talk to you like normal people. You're thinking of some other group, like the Beautiful People of Hollywood culture, or the world of rock and roll. Someone who is really a hippy will sit down and discuss anything with an open mind. That is, unless they are a Meathead, which is the antithesis of true hippy culture.
Hinduism and Hippyism intersected in the sixties. To find out more, click here.
The Hippies Were Right!
Green homes? Organic food? Nature is good?
Time To Give The Ol' Tie-Dyers Some Respect!
by Mark Morford/The San Francisco Chronicle
Sat., 05 May 2007
Go ahead, name your movement. Name something good and positive and pro-environment and eco-friendly that's happening right now in the newly "greening" America and don't say more guns in Texas or fewer reproductive choices for women or endless vile unwinnable BushCo wars in the Middle East lasting until roughly 2075 because that would defeat the whole point of this perky little column and destroy its naive tone of happy rose-colored sardonic optimism. OK?
I'm talking about, say, energy-efficient light bulbs. I'm looking at organic foods going mainstream. I mean chemical-free cleaning products widely available at Target and I'm talking saving the whales and protecting the dolphins and I mean yoga studios flourishing in every small town, giant boxes of organic cereal at Costco and non-phthalates dildos at Good Vibes and the Toyota Prius becoming the nation's oddest status symbol. You know, good things.
Look around: we have entire industries devoted to recycled paper, a new generation of cheap solar-power technology and an Oscar for "An Inconvenient Truth" and even the soulless corporate monsters over at famously heartless joints like Wal-Mart are now claiming that they really, really care about saving the environment because, well, "it's the right thing to do" (read: It's purely economic and all about their bottom line because if they don't start caring they'll soon be totally screwed on manufacturing and shipping costs at/from all their brutal Chinese sweatshops).
There is but one conclusion you can draw from the astonishing (albeit fitful, bittersweet) pro-environment sea change now happening in the culture and (reluctantly, nervously) in the halls of power in D.C., one thing we must all acknowledge in our wary, jaded, globally warmed universe: The hippies had it right all along. Oh yes they did.
You know it's true. All this hot enthusiasm for healing the planet and eating whole foods and avoiding chemicals and working with nature and developing the self? Came from the hippies. Alternative health? Hippies. Green cotton? Hippies. Reclaimed wood? Recycling? Humane treatment of animals? Medical pot? Alternative energy? Natural childbirth? Non-GMO seeds? It came from the granola types (who, of course, absorbed much of it from ancient cultures), from the alternative worldviews, from the underground and the sidelines and from far off the goddamn grid and it's about time the media, the politicians, the culture as a whole sent out a big, wet, hemp-covered apology.
Here's a suggestion, from one of my more astute ex-hippie readers: Instead of issuing carbon credits so industrial polluters can clear their collective corporate conscience, maybe, to help offset all the savage damage they've done to the soul of the planet all these years, these commercial cretins should instead buy some karma credits from the former hippies themselves. You know, from those who've been working for the health of the planet, quite thanklessly, for the past 50 years and who have, as a result, built up quite a storehouse of good karma. You think?
Of course, you can easily argue that much of the "authentic" hippie ethos -- the anti-corporate ideology, the sexual liberation, the anarchy, the push for civil rights, the experimentation -- has been totally leeched out of all these new movements, that corporations have forcibly co-opted and diluted every single technology and humble pro-environment idea and Ben & Jerry's ice cream cone and Odwalla smoothie to make them both palatable and profitable. But does this somehow make the organic oils in that body lotion any more harmful? Verily, it does not.
You might also just as easily claim that much of the nation's reluctant turn toward environmental health has little to do with the hippies per se, that it's taking the threat of global meltdown combined with the notion of really, really expensive ski tickets to slap the nation's incredibly obese ass into gear and force consumers to begin to wake up to the savage gluttony and wastefulness of American culture as everyone starts wondering, oh my God, what's going to happen to swimming pools and NASCAR and free shipping from Amazon? Of course, without the '60s groundwork, without all the radical ideas and seeds of change planted nearly five decades ago, what we'd be turning to in our time of need would be a great deal more hopeless indeed.
But if you're really bitter and shortsighted, you could say the entire hippie movement overall was just incredibly overrated, gets far too much cultural credit for far too little actual impact, was pretty much a giant excuse to slack off and enjoy dirty lazy responsibility-free sex romps and do a ton of drugs and avoid Vietnam and not bathe for a month and name your child Sunflower or Shiva Moon or Chakra Lennon Sapphire Bumblebee. This is what's called the reactionary simpleton's view. It blithely ignores history, perspective, the evolution of culture as a whole. You know, just like America.
But, you know, whatever. The proofs are easy enough to trace. The core values and environmental groundwork laid by the '60s counterculture are still so intact and potent even the stiffest neocon Republican has to acknowledge their extant power. It's all right there: Treehugger.com is the new '60s underground hippy zine. Ecstasy is the new LSD. Visible tattoos are the new longhairs. And bands as diverse as Pearl Jam to Bright Eyes to NIN to the Dixie Chicks are writing savage anti-Bush, anti-war songs for a new, ultra-jaded generation.
And oh yes, speaking of good ol' MDMA (Ecstasy), even drug culture is getting some new respect. Staid old Time mag just ran a rather snide little story about the new studies being conducted by Harvard and the National Institute of Mental Health into the astonishing psychospiritual benefits of goodly entheogens such as LSD, psilocybin and MDMA. Unfortunately, the piece basically backhands Timothy Leary and the entire "excessive," "naive" drug culture of yore in favor of much more "sane" and "careful" scientific analysis happening now, as if the only valid methods for attaining knowledge and an understanding of spirit were through control groups and clinical, mysticism-free examination. Please.
Still, the fact that serious scientific research into entheogens is being conducted even in the face of the most anti-science, pro-pharmaceutical, ultra-conservative presidential regime in recent history is proof enough that all the hoary old hippie mantras about expanding the mind and touching God through drugs were onto something after all (yes, duh). Tim Leary is probably smiling wildly right now -- though that might be due to all the mushrooms he's been sharing with Kerouac and Einstein and Mary Magdalene. Mmm, heaven.
Of course, true hippie values mean you're not really supposed to care about or attach to any of this, you don't give a damn for the hollow ego stroke of being right all along, for slapping the culture upside the head and saying, See? Do you see? It was never about the long hair and the folk music and Woodstock and taking so much acid you see Jesus and Shiva and Buddha tongue kissing in a hammock on the Dog Star, nimrods.
It was, always and forever, about connectedness. It was about how we are all in this together. It was about resisting the status quo and fighting tyrannical corporate/political power and it was about opening your consciousness and seeing new possibilities of how we can all live with something resembling actual respect for the planet, for alternative cultures, for each other. You know, all that typical hippie crap no one believes in anymore. Right?
Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate and in the Datebook section of the San Francisco Chronicle.
Thoughts for the author? E-mail him - click here.
Go to original article: http://sfgate.com
"We don't study history to learn about the past; we study it to learn about the present." Perform an act of random non-hypocrisy: learn something from history today.
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