I've got one of these books. I bought it in 1970. What a classic documentary of the era.
Posted on 12/19/2004 8:07:12 AM PST by MississippiMasterpiece
On the other hand, what I would trade to be young again.
You bet! Just the other day I read a reference to him as a "right wing commentator"! (And 'commentator' might not have been the word used; I don't quite remember, it might have been 'attack dog'!)
Ping
Well as somebody who went to Woodstock and then enlisted in the US Army, I'm here to tell you that the age of Aquarius was BS. It was all about getting high, getting laid and getting away with it all.
Anybody who doesn't blindly goose step to their drumbeat is automatically a "conservative" to a Leftist.
Guess he'll be cryogenically frozen for a long, long time! Might as well just pull the plug now.
Full quote: "I hate hippies! They want to save the world, but all they do is smoke pot and smell bad."
I've got one of these books. I bought it in 1970. What a classic documentary of the era.
not far....their all up in the Santa Cruz Mountains!
To this day, there are people who are convinced that they took part in these struggles just by being young and alive at the time, and who have the beads and the Dylan albums to prove it.Do we want to be the subject of a similar essay written about the conservative movement some 40 years from now? Heed what he said. You will not change the world by just being around or by posting comments on message boards. You need to get politically active. Join a local Free Republic chapter. Work with your local Republican Party/Libertarian Party. Write letters to your congressman. And so forth.
And, IMHO it was fueled by fear and drugs. Which raises interesting questions: Did the hippies take drugs because they were self medicating because of fear, paranoia, etc? Are the people of that generation that are now on Prozac taking it because of the effects of the drugs they took or did they always need to be medicated?
I was in the thick of that whole scene but I never accepted the Left uncritically nor did I fail to see the glaring contradictions of the hippie culture which lambasted conformity while insisting on its OWN codes of dress,thought,and style.
I have this theory that the reason the Left captured so many youth during that time is that they promised risk,action and channeled that need all young people have to rebel and challenge the status quo.The Right,on the other hand,seemed stale and static,way too intellectual and effete.Where were the Right wing versions of SDS and the Yippies who would take the fight to the peaceniks and Commies IN THE STREETS?Nowhere to be found so the fact that the Right wing took the"high"road left them essentially unappealing and moribund.Really,what 20 year old in 1968 would get excited about having tea at William Buckley's estate in Sharon,Ct?
I spent the sixties dabbling in a little bit of everything.Went to Birch Society meetings as well as SDS conclaves.I was incredibly intellectually curious and wanted to explore any and all ideologies from extreme right to extreme left.Loved Goldwater but also loved hitch-hiking to Tahoe with pot smoking freaks.Tore up Communist protest signs at College of San Mateo but also marched throgh campus buildings at Berkeley as black and white radicals swarmed throgh buildings like locusts,wielding pipes and smashing windows.Heady stuff for a 21 year old kid from the suburbs.REALLY loved the music scene of the time and saw all the old classic rock groups.It was a wonderfully exciting time to be alive.
Today at 57 I am still that eclectic gadfly,more Conservative than Liberal on most issues but never an idealogue or a bot type.Can venture out for a couple of days a week at some local ghetto high schols and feel right at home with the little homeboys and girls but can also converse intellgently with doctors and college professors.I love the FR site for its wide array of opinions and breadth of member's experiences.I mostly lurk but when the topic of hippies come up I just could not resist throwing my life into the mix!
Jump in more often
David Horowitz and his book Radical Son tells me that honest thought will lead most people out of the Liberal swamp...I never really went that far left in my 20s ....I just didnt question the thinking du jour enough.
Uh, yeah. Sure. Right.
I read Horowitze's book.Fascinating account of those times.To be honest,Horowitz never had as much crediblity with the radical left as he claimed. He was more of an armchair Marxist,comfortably ensconsed in his office at Ramparts Magazine while the Street Fighting Men on Telegraph Avenue were "smashing the State"and causing chaos in the most wildly anachistic ways possible.
For me,the moment I knew the New Left"communards"-especially the leaders-had played their followers for suckers was when Tom Hayden took the ten million dollar divorce settlement from Jane Fonda!This was the same Tom Hayden who conducted a workshop at the "People's Festival"in Berkeley in 1969 about how to use guns to"protect ourselves from pigs and right wingers".How paradoxical.
To be fair,I had qualms with many on the Right also,especially a particulary virulent JBS chapter head from Southern Califonia who used to try to fill my head with some obnoxious racist garbage,both anti-black and anti-Jewish.I used to walk out of his house at Lake Tahoe feeling dirty inside.Thankfully,the following year they sold the house and his ill vibe found someone else to haunt.
Some of the above tendencies seem to never to change.
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