Words

Just a few words about words here, before I get too far along with this blog. I need to place some disclaimers and warning labels here.

I intend to discuss many issues which can be uncomfortable or controversial for some people. These are adult topics such as sex and drugs. And I plan to address them with ordinary street language. Hippies cannot abide censorship. They value a free press and personal honesty. In polite company, hippies can be delicate and use euphemisms if need be. But in more comfortable settings, all subjects are valid, euphemisms sound silly, and swear words are useful and expressive. I plan to emulate these values here, to give a better sense of the counterculture dialectic. So please keep in mind, no one is forcing you to read this. And please take responsibility for your own children if you don't want them reading this.

The word "hippie" was in use for several years before it became applied to baby boomers with long hair. It is derived from "hipster," which meant a denizen of the Harlem jazz scene in the 1940s. By the early 60s, the word "hippie" was used to describe a white person who tried to act like a black hipster. It appears in song lyrics as early as 1959 ("Hippy Hippy Shake" by Chan Romero.) When a young generation with beatnik values began to congregate in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco, it was journalist Michael Fallon who gets the credit or blame for being the first to label them as hippies, in an article published September 5, 1965.

These Haight-Ashbury hippies were the original hippies, along with their counterparts in Greenwich Village, New York, and scattered here and there along the west coast. By October of 1967 - a scant few months after The Summer of Love - a Haight-Ashbury theater troupe called The Diggers had already declared The Death of the Hippie by staging a funerary media circus in the streets. It was meant to highlight the role of the media in coining the hippie label, and to reject that label summarily. Of course, it did not work. The label became more popular, and hordes of runaways poured into San Francisco yearning to be hippies too. I feel that it's important to distinguish the original hippies - the ones who first developed the philosophy and lifestyle, and the first ones to be tagged with the hippie label - from the subsequent influx of admirers and imitators who came along after the Death of the Hippie performance. In my opinion, the only real hippies got their street cred between 1965 and 1967. Anyone who came along after that, including myself, has no claim as a genuine, official, original hippie. They're just wannabe hippies. But everyone calls them hippies anyway, and they carry on with the cause regardless. So in this blog, I'll just call them hippies, too. When I need to make a distinction, I will call the '65-'67 crowd the original hippies.

Dictionaries tend to spell the singular noun as "hippie." However, most of them acknowledge "hippy" as an alternate spelling. For my first article in this blog, I used the "hippie" spelling. But personally I prefer to use "hippy," as it seems a bit less diminutive to me. So that's what I will do from this point forward, except maybe when I am belittling someone. And of course, the plural is always spelled "hippies" regardless.

Not all environmentalists identify as hippies. And not every hippy is an environmentalist. Not all liberals can be considered hippies, nor can all activists, all stoners, or all Grateful Dead fans. You can find crew cuts at a Dead show, rednecks smoking pot behind the garage, and prudish grandma liberals in the voting booth. But you can also find radical intellectuals who never get high, long-haired freaks waving the Confederate flag, geriatric hippies, and hippies with haircuts. The term "hippy" is a sweeping generalization that seldom pertains to specific, real world individuals. It is only with a certain amount of tongue-in-cheek irony that I use the term to refer to the people of several generations worldwide who espouse a culture of peace, equality, environmental responsibility, personal and artistic freedom, food safety, and spiritual exploration. I will frequently include kindred social movements under the general umbrella of the hippy counterculture, such as women's liberation, African-American civil rights, no nukes, indigenous peoples, anti-whaling, and organic gardeners. Hippies do not take credit for starting all of these movements, only for embracing them. The original student draft resisters had conventional short hair, and could not have been hippies because the term had not yet been pinned on them. But in retrospect, I am going to claim them as hippies here, because their philosophy became such a central theme of the hippy creed. It's also important to note that for many people, being a full-blown hippy was just a phase they went through for a few years. They may have retained some of the values they gained from the experience, but they have gone on to lead more conventional lives. So I will be using terms like baby boomer, liberal, student, activist, deadhead, radical, environmentalist, stoner, freak, rocker, health nut, pacifist, tree hugger, granola burner, long-hair, flower child, and peacenik interchangeably with hippy, depending on the specific context. Please take with a pinch of salt, with the understanding that these labels do not actually fit any given individual human being; and with the understanding that the counterculture consists of many strands woven together - many kindred movements that are similar in theory, but which have not always agreed with each other in practice. So I have no right to lump so many divergent groups and persons together under the hippy rubric. But I am going to do so anyway for my own convenience, so that I can get my points across.

And that is the sole purpose of this blog: to write down my thoughts about the counterculture and convey a few points that I'd like to make about it. I am working on a specific train of thought that I have on the subject, and I am not open to having it derailed by other peoples' opinions. I will be dealing with some extremely controversial material, and giving it my own spin. I am well aware that this is not going to sit well with certain people. So I have turned off public comments for this blog. I get really upset at the sort of things people tend to say in online comments sections, even when the subject is completely innocuous. So I prefer to work in a vacuum. I will try to be accurate and use proper spelling and grammar. But if you spot a mistake, I don't need to know. It's not going to kill you to just ignore it. We can fix any typos later, when someone offers me a million dollars to publish this in book form. If you have strong disagreements with my opinions, I really couldn't care less. You are free to start your own blog to discuss it. If you find resonance and agreement with me, I don't need to know about it. Just tell your friends or share my blog on Facebook. Thanks!

I use Wikipedia a lot as my basic reference source. And I get most of the graphics from Google Images. I also consult Dictionary.com when I have disagreements with the spell checker. I want to give credit where credit is due, but immaculate footnotes are too tedious. So could we please just consider this to be one giant footnote to cover my whole blog.*

*From Wikipedia/Google Images/Dictionary.com unless otherwise noted.

Becoming a Hippie

Anyone can be a hippie. All you have to do is give a shit.

Care about something other than your money and your social status, and you're almost there. Care about humanity, care about the earth. Care about your body, and the food you put in it. Care about music and art, or care about working with your hands. You are a unique individual, free to think about the things that really matter in this all-too-brief lifetime that has been granted to you. A hippie is simply someone who believes in a better world, and is willing to live a life devoted to bringing it about.

Not a long hair to be seen - 1964, Berkeley, CA

Opinions vary - and experiments are ongoing - as to how best to improve conditions. Some hippies live in the city, and some live in the country. Some hippies eat meat, and some don't. Some are traditional liberal Democrats, and others are so far to the right or left that they wrap right around the scale to where the opposites meet. Some hippies tote guns, and others believe in non-violent conflict resolution. Lots of hippie dudes have long hair, but it isn't required. These details can have profound political implications for hippies, yet there is no general consensus among hippies about any of them. As a result, maybe you can easily spot an obvious hippie, but you can't always identify all of the hippies in a crowd. And when you do find one, you still know nothing about that person's personal beliefs or practices until you talk to them.

But why would anybody want to be a hippie? Isn't it a pejorative term? Hippies are dirty, smelly, lazy drop-outs with unrealistic dreams who do drugs and dance crazy at Grateful Dead concerts. They think it's still the 1960s.

Oh yes, it can be very pejorative and hurtful to call someone a hippie. No one likes to be labelled and stereotyped with abusive invective. But it matters whose mouth it comes out of. Said by one gay man to another, "faggot" can be acceptable, even endearing. The same applies to "nigger" in African American culture. It is a badge of pride to withstand society's cruel words, and more so to re-purpose these words within the ranks of the oppressed. Similarly, hippies like to call each other "hippie." But when people unsympathetic to the cause use the term, it rankles - as it is intended to do.

This is not to suggest that hippies are a genuine oppressed minority group. No one is born a hippie, it's a voluntary choice. But the hippie movement has always joined in the equal rights struggles of oppressed groups of all descriptions. It might be fair to say that hippies made themselves into an oppressed minority, out of sympathy for those who were born that way. The press mocked the early hippies, and the police beat them. Restaurants refused to serve them. To feel society's scorn in this way only made the hippies more resolute to demand civil rights for all.

And it should be clear to anyone with awareness of civil rights issues, that to characterize all hippies as dirty, lazy, unrealistic, and so forth, is to stereotype a human being. It is not funny to strip away someone's dignity and worth like that. I should not have to say that basic hygiene and the work ethic are not incompatible with hippie values. As for realism, nothing gets done without a vision. The future is boundless. We can afford to daydream.

Becoming a hippie is seldom an instant decision. Every hippie that I've met has a different reason for it, and a different story about it. But I think I can identify some common factors: Prolonged exposure to certain types of music, art and literature can often play a role. Personal acquaintance with a hippie can certainly tip the scales, as well. But there has to be a predisposition, a tendency to question society's status quo. For example, if you are the type to read the ingredients on your cereal box and wonder what you are putting in your body; and if you like the Beatles even though they were ancient history, then you have potential as a hippie. Researching your favorite issues will do the rest. Soon you will find yourself at protest rallies and food co-op meetings.

Or not. I'm not here to talk you into it. That's the thing about it. You will have to find your own reasons.

Yours truly, 6th grade, 1971

I consider myself a hippie. My reason is fairly easy to explain. I was just a kid in the 60's, too young to have credentials as one of the original hippies. My father was going to college at the time. So my family knew lots of hippies. I was impressed with their compassion and creativity. And they listened to amazing music. So I started skipping haircuts in the sixth grade.