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.
The conformity of high school faux-hippies enraged me less than their hypocrisy. My school didn't have any true hippies - I would've liked them; musically and philosophically I feel very closely aligned with them. But we just had jocks who played lacrosse, smoked pot, beat up on nerds, shunned metal heads, and mocked goths. I grew up thinking of the Greatful Dead, Phish, Bob Marley, drugs, baja pullovers and pajama pants as inseparable from the assholes who used to beat the crap out of me and my friends, trip us in the hallways, and play keep-away with our notebooks.
But high school was a long time ago, so I'll try to lose the chip on my shoulder and replace it with a pchippy on my shoulder.
For the most part I have to agree with the Phish lyrics comment, however most of the words are fun to say (Think "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious"), several tell decent fantasy stories, and there are even a few songs (most written by non-member Tom Marshall) with genuine poetry. I hope everyone knows when I started college I loathed this band, and it wasn't until my last semester that I let myself listen to them.
I played lacrosse in high school and got the shit kicked out of me freshman year. I made a conscious decision during my junior year to stop the violence in the locker room and never hit a dude unless we were actually playing lacrosse or sparring. I never wore a Baja nor a Caribbean belt.
To roughly quote Ian MacKaye from Tufts class: "It's easy to shit on hippies in the punk scene, but remember hippies were the real radicals, and that's something I always appreciate."
Merry Pranksters?
You can call a hippie naive and maybe even annoying, and maybe there'd be some truth to it. But, they're usually engaging, interesting people. Stoners are boring. I'd agree with most of what pchippy says about hippies. None of that stuff applies to stoners, who seem to only care about smoking weed and sitting down (sometimes sitting down next to a skateboard).
Full disclosure: My mom was a full-blown hippie until I came along and made her settle down. She snuck into Woodstock, for example. When I was little, her idea of a "vacation" was to take me to a campground on a blueberry farm in rural Maine -- we "paid" for our lodging by picking blueberries ALL DAY LONG.