in defense of hippies
Yeah, it's pretty easy to be dismissive of hippies. Phish's lyrics are largely stupid and meaningless. Hemp jewelry is just silly, and it's a conformist fad. The whole pro-hemp movement is disingenuous. Dreadlocks aren't natural if you have to put time and effort into creating them, shaping them, and so on. Tie-dye shirts are often garish, and since most people who have tie-dyes bought them, they're just another marketed commodity in many ways. But all in all, I like hippies and hippie culture, for lots of reasons.
1.) An emphasis on handcrafts, traditional techniques, natural materials. An understanding that "new" is not the same as "good" and "old" is not the same as "bad."
2.) An eclectic openness to things that ordinary people would avoid as being too weird. Tofu. Geodesic domes. Composting toilets. Some of these things work, some don't. You try them out. If they work, you keep them.
3.) Comfort with the human body, acceptance of nakedness, and rejection of the notion that everyone ought to be the same size and shape.
4.) An understanding that making a living is not the same thing as living.
5.) An understanding that there are lots of ways to be, and that we really do have the option of choosing among them.
6.) An ethic that stresses people over things, that encourages cooperation but doesn't stifle individualism, and that sees personal transformation as a necessary part of transforming the world. The hippie ethic says that if you have convictions, you have to put them into practice, not just vote the right way and send off a check to the Sierra Club.
7.) The idea that everyone is naturally creative. I was first introduced to poetry by a hippie poet; every real hippie plays guitar or paints or makes eccentric welded iron sculpture. Hippies were pretty much the ones who discovered that rock-n-roll doesn't have to be about Crying on Prom Night and I Want to Hold Your Hand, that songs can be one minute long or twenty minutes long, that they can be in three-four time or seven-eight time.
8.) A love for the Earth as a place of beauty and a sustainer of life.
9.) A deep belief that "moral" and "legal" aren't exactly synonyms.
10.) I think peace signs are kind of kitschy, but the hippie commitment to peace as a value is something I unashamedly support.
I went to a hippie nursery school as a child. My mom had long hair and did hand-weaving, my dad had a beard and brewed beer. We gardened. We belonged to the local health-food co-op; I still have happy memories of playing underneath the tables while the co-op members sliced up big wheels of cheese for distribution to individual families. I attended a hippie-influenced day-camp in Vermont; every day we'd learn about nature in the morning, then swim in the pond back in the pasture, and drink home-made sarsaparilla. My best friend's father (when I was ten) was famous for his dust collection. He owned about a million books, too.
Granted, lots of the "hippies" you knew back in high school or in college were stupid conformists, many of whom only paid superficial lip service to the values I've listed above. There's a reason for that. They were teenagers. Teenagers are stupid conformists. They all think of themselves as non-conformists, but they're so deeply immersed in trying to forge a public identity for themselves that they naturally gravitate toward outward signs of group affiliation. Adults do that too, but we get a bit more relaxed about it. At least that's how it seems to me.
Peace, man.