Old hippies can be cool, but a very great many of them are still self important, focused on being “hip” (hence the name), highly judgemental, impatient, and more than a little crazy. I know the breed well: remember, I went to Berkeley. I lived there. I breathed the air.
And I was thinking about it: after all the promise, after all the “revolution in the air”, what do they have to show for it? What have they accomplished? They put a no-name, second rate soap opera actor in the White House, who started several new wars and added our grandchildren to the national debt (our children were already in up to their eyeballs).
They have made it socially impossible for traumatized women to object publicly to sharing bathrooms with biological men. They have that going for them.
They lost the Vietnam War for us, after it has been won–at great cost–on the ground. This is one thing I have never understood: they shed huge tears watching some show about black slave families being broken up by the cruel slave-masters, but don’t even KNOW that hundreds of thousands of families were broken up in South Vietnam alone, sent to separate labor and psychological torture camps, and many of them were never reunited. The people who loved Kunta Kinte did not give a flying phuc about anybody named Nguyen. All that got disappeared, much like the desaparecido’s of Latin America, with the difference that nobody is talking about those horrors even today.
The fucking hippies still think their victory over national interest, common decency, empathy for the suffering of others, and political sanity counts as a great accomplishment. I don’t. It think it is a scandalous shame.
What do they have? They accomplished something close to nothing. Holotropic Breathwork has done me some good. Peter Levine did some time in Esalen. They brought yoga back from India.
But what I see, now, is that mostly what membership in this tribe provides is not vision, but membership. That is the benefit. They know one another. They recognize one another. When they meet–and I have the young imitators in mind here–they have an instant bond.
But the original hippies literally thought that if they shouted loud enough and did enough drugs, the world would spontaneously conform to their notions of the way “things ought to be”.
If we see kids now shouting about the way things ought to be, we can see the path back to them. And we can easily see an identical but more fully developed narcissism, childishness, lack of understanding of how the world works, lack of a plan for actual long term improvements in the condition of any living human beings, and, most importantly, the same self congratulation based upon nothing more substantial than shared feelings.