I was listening to the Rolling Stones song “No Expectations”, and thought about the lyric “once I was a rich man/now I’m so poor. Never in my sweet, charmed life have I felt like this before.”
I got to thinking: it’s unclear if his “wealth” was literal or figurative, but if he was a typical hippy, it was both.
Then I got to thinking about Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone”. “You went to all the best schools, but you know you only used to get juiced in it”. Something like that. Rich girl, who gave it all up to wander, and wound up having to in effect sell her body to get by.
Look at the social wastelands generated by the 60’s. Was there really hope? What happened to them? Some were permanently damaged by drugs or died–I’ve known several people who had no idea why they were still alive–but most of them just sort of stopped wandering at some point, and settled down–petulantly, no doubt, at first–then started living more or less ordinary, bourgeois lives after a ten year or so gap.
What did they get in that period? You’ve all heard the old saying: if you can remember the 60’s (70’s), you weren’t there. David Bowie supposedly lost an entire year of his life. Is that really living?
I think it is past time to recognize that the 60’s, far from being a period of deep creativity, were in fact characterized by a profound neglect of social responsibilities–to the future, to the present–and the hauteur with which former drop-outs looked at those who failed to sympathize with them does nothing to mitigate this.
Urban blight is a product of the socialism of the 60’s. The inability of wide swathes of our youth to achieve a sense of belonging and “ennestedness” is a product of the 60’s. The essence of Conservatism is to try and protect what is useful in human life, and the most important of this is extending to our children a place in the world, and a sense of belonging there, and the capacity to be happy there.
A trap, you say? Nothing doing, you say? Normality is for fools. It is for saps. It is for cowardly conformist losers. The true “life” is on the road, in the winds of passion, not stuck in some 3 bedroom suburban home raising kids.
Before you insist on that riff, look at the world we actually live in, not the fantasy you can imagine. Millions of kids hit the road in the 60’s. Did it do them any good, on balance? Are they happier? Most of the ex-hippies I know are neurotic and maladjusted. A high percentage of them have or have had to overcome substance abuse problems. People who are happy don’t feel the need to anesthetize themselves, which is all drugs do. That is why you voluntarily lose long periods of your life. That is not living.
Living is having useful work to do, and people around you who understand you, care about you, and are loyal to you. Vagrants do not have useful work, and they cannot rely on most of those around them. Deadheads are notoriously flaky. They love one another when they are high–I’ve seen it–but I’ve also noticed that long term LSD use makes people irritable, and lacking in even the most basic emotional self control.
There are so many examples–we are surrounded by them–but take this song, by Green Day http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8krdLDuEx3U
Listen both to the quality of the music–the mechanical dullness, the dissonance–and listen to the lyrics. He is probably singing about trying to sleep while stoned, but a clear element in this is almost certainly clinical depression. He is sad. He has no point or purpose.
And his parents were likely hippies. They likely didn’t discipline him, and probably taught him that much of America is “bullshit”, and that the spontaneous arrogance of youth is superior to the time-honored truisms of the old and the dead.
And this is what you get.
A wicked wind blew through here in the 60’s/70’s. All of this is the result of only PARTIAL rejection of God and American ideals. This is a hint of socialism, only a hint. Much worse is possible.
At the same time, much better is possible, if we can look at this era and its aftermath with unjaundiced and new eyes.
It has seemed to me more than once that the stubbornness with which former hippies hold their political views–in the face of all evidence continuing to argue they have merit–is in no small measure related to a desire for that apparently wasted part of their lives to have actually MEANT something, when in reality they were just running–and not finding–in almost all cases.