What is it that the hippie's did right? Remember this question?

This was asked at two different places. Here at Democratic Underground and at commongroundcommonsense. I don't know how much anyone can learn from it, but it grew from one single question to 258 post. There are still people active and telling their experiences.

http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/index.php?showtopic=5062

Stepped out of the mainstream and resisted the conventional

Learned about living in the NOW

......
Plenty of things we did wrong, too.

difference

LOTS OF ENERGY

very to little mistrust - except for the gum't of course. us against them - but we felt we could somehow enlighten them, as though they'd listen. those were the days....

and horribly slandered and marginalized by mainstream media.

They were always a fringe group and then they became fashion, along with the hippie fashion becoming popular some of the culture and mentality of the hippies rubbed off, diluted by still powerful messages of love, peace, sharing and brotherhood.

This shows how a relatively small but powerful human movement can affect the larger culture.

..but there is plenty to be proud of. "Hippie" means different things to diffent people, but I'm thinking about more than the weekend hippies of the time, and I'm looking past styles and fads.

Our nonjudgemental willingness accept new experiences and cultures, to be a part of meaningful change in social, political, and spiritual perspectives, and our looks at life from other than a consumerist stance still stand.

. . . did hippies ever figure out that it's okay to trust anyone/someone over thirty?

B-)

I think we got over that but the main thing that referred to was that we did not want to live those conventional lives and we did not accept things at face value. So much of our culture was about thinking for yourself and not trusting the institutions that wanted to brainwash you. We had been taught critical thinking in school and asked questions rather than just learning the answers for the test (as the teaching goes now to prepare for the every child left behind act)

Today, my students don't want to think they just want to know the answer.

Even my grad students just want the answer. I try to tell them there is no answer, but they just keep at it. Drives me nuts!!

onlly kidding....... I know lots of great young folks. Two of them live in my house and bear a striking resemblance to me.

parent-pleasing behaviors. We didn't want to be daddy's best boy and we threw off the whole racket by walking away from everything they said was important. We didn't buy their fear and warnings to us. I think the right wing has managed to terrorize the populace with fear of poverty and forcing people to become wage slaves. We believed we could take care of ourselves....it drove them nuts!

attitudes. To avoid poverty (i.e., starvation, homelessness), hippies pooled their resources together and shared them. Instead of money exchanged, barter of services was used between them. There was a loose organization such as one person or a small group would obtain food for everyone, another group would prepare it, another group would clean up after the meal. No one was officially "the boss", there was little if any hierarchy to cloud relationships. At communes, children would be taken care of by any available adult and with the same care if the children were his/hers.

And hippies did not define themselves by wealth or which possessions they owned. It's hard to imagine now as this is our culture now.

I can't get over how former-hippies have gone beyond the values of their parents and the Establishment. The theory I have is that a lot of them were prisoners of conventionality and they merely followed the trend versus embracing the underlying principles of a 60's Utopia.

Trying the unconventional.

Kind of a simple idea. But everyone I knew loved to get stoned. And then we would wax political.

sure, they were there, kind of like background music,

But it was the politics that bound and motivated us........

This is what fuckers like Falwell should embrace. It was a time of solidarity. The 'hippies' were trying to let Americans in general know that their government was fucking the world and using Americas young and brightest to do their dirty work.

...but many of those you'll find on the right in these here troubled times sported all the accoutrement's of the hippie thing back there in the day. Somebody needs to do a thorough search of high school and college yearbooks on this topic.

The draw of moral absolutes pulls in both directions, with many of the most susceptible always heeding the call of the strongest and loudest. Which these days comes from the shit-swallowing scum of the right.

see how they've grown

sustainability, rah rah rah

The capitalists always seem to win over the idealists.

we are baby boomers. At every stage of our lives, we are aided by the fact thay there are so many of us. That has also been a disadvantage at times but for the most part I believe our generation will get attention because we outnumber so many other groups in our society.

Hippies were everywhere. They couldn't help but pay attention to us and hear what we were saying.