Far Out, Man

I came of age in the ‘60s and ‘70s and, while I wasn’t exactly a hippy, I certainly embraced the concept of the whole hippy movement.

When I was in college the hippy era had pretty much peaked, but its legacy lingered. There was a great diversity in the student population, but those at the polar opposite of us latter-day hippies were the frat boys and sorority girls. They tended to be, I presumed at the time – and I admit I may be freely engaging in stereotyping here – people from a more privileged and entitled background than the rest of us, and they certainly had wilder parties. We thought they were a little too preppy, a little too pretentious. We laughed at them for their attitudes, their toga parties, their way of dressing, their quaint rules and secret initiations and snobby inclusiveness. 

Little did we know that they would grow up and slide right in to take over the businesses and corporations and politics that rule us all with their quaint rules and secret initiations and snobby inclusiveness.

The hippy movement has been the subject of much ridicule over the years, with the popular notion now depicting hippies as zonked out, drugged up naive flower children acting like a bunch of nitwits which, since we were in our teens and early twenties, we of course were. 

But that doesn’t diminish what we espoused. 

We were, obviously, against war. Facing the very real prospect of being sent to the other side of the world into some bloody meat grinder for no good reason sharpens one’s attitudes about the nobility of killing people in their own country. 

We were for racial equality and against bigotry and profiling and mistreating people because of their skin color or ethnicity. We were for sexual equality and believed wholeheartedly in women’s rights.

We were against the establishment, which we viewed as too authoritarian and too far removed from serving the real needs of the people. We were proud environmentalists, fighting to save the air and the rivers and oceans from pollution that was killing and sickening humans and animals and plants, trying to convince people that acid in the rain and toxins in our air and mercury in fish and asbestos in our houses were not the natural order of things.

We were against big corporations which put profit ahead of people.

We were for going back to nature and growing our own food. We were for music that had meaning and that spoke to our souls.

We were for non-conformity and expressing ourselves as unique and reveling in our differences. If sometimes the only ways we could do this was by having long hair and wearing ridiculous clothes, then so be it.

We were against a society we found too constricting, preferring a free society that let people make choices for themselves. We were into trying new things, new ideas, new ways to make life better. We were for giving and sharing, not taking and hoarding.

We were for tolerance and equality. We were for peace and love and living and let live. We were for having fun and laughing and refusing to let anyone take away our childish delight in the wonderful world around us.

Yeah, pretty radical stuff, I know.

Looking back all these years later, I don’t know why we would laugh at that naïveté and those heartfelt protests and the pie-in-the-sky hopes and dreams. Looking at where we are now in the world, at what we have allowed ourselves to become, it just makes me want to cry.