What happened was that the war in Vietnam ended and we began having babies. It’s hard to be anti-establishment, to refute almost all the values of established society and rebuild, redesign, start from scratch experimenting on communes—when you have babies who deserve a future, to not live in the mud and toilet facilities of the 19th century, and to get a decent education, even if it is a future in a society that one feels has developed corrupt values. And new people stop showing up when the most tangible evidence that the society has gone wrong—the unjustifiable War and the draft to that War, ends and all that are left are the subtleties—the subtleties that survive to this day. People don’t revolt over mere subtleties, they must have something tangible, a glaring, on-going insult presented before their very eyes and invading their homes.
So, most of us conformed, outwardly anyway. We went back to school, finished our degrees, developed our careers, bought homes, raised our babies. And we had the displeasure of being one of the foci of American Vietnam War era historical revisionism by said establishment. The common lament I hear from friends from that era to their children is, “You had to have been there.”
Since those years, we have had the luxury of hindsight. My parents were of the opinion of @rem1981‘s grandparents, but since those years, I, and many of my cohorts from that time have gained a larger picture and understanding of our parent’s generation far beyond our living rooms back home. They grew up in a devastating national economic depression. Then they were called to fight in a two-front war that they initially didn’t want but soon it became clear that they had no choice if their country was to survive, a massive world war that pitted tyranny against the democracies that they were unsure they could win until two long years into it—at a time when they, themselves, should have been buying homes and having babies. And they won.
They came home and went to work, built new, safe, comfortable subdivisions, an interstate highway system, thousands of institutions of higher learning with better access to the common man, broadened American international business and brought the American economy to heights never seen before in any country in modern history. The debt my generation owes our father’s and mother’s is… there are no words, it’s ineffable. They truly were the Greatest Generation.
My portion of the following generation grew up in that environment of soft living, of safety, education and good healthcare built by my parent’s generation. We were raised to believe that this was the result—and always would be—of living in a society that valued most of all Life, Liberty and Happiness, the Four Freedoms as described by FDR and depicted in Norman Rockwell’s famous painting, democracy for all, universal suffrage and that all men were created equal. We were good, the shining light on the hill, and all the luxury we reaped was a result of hard work, honesty, heroic defense of and a stoic commitment to these values—and we wanted nothing but the same for all the peoples of the world. They could live this way too, if they only emulated us, emulated what became known to us as the American Way. This is what we were taught in those schools built by our fathers and it was what we believed.
But there was a dissonance in the background. There were films on the nightly news of Americans, mostly in the South, being waterhosed, beaten, attacked by police dogs because they were peacefully marching against strange things like the Poll Tax and voter’s rights—rights my portion of the generation of the 1960’s though everyone had. My father, a Kennedy liberal, explained that it was because the victims of this violence were “colored”. Then some white college kids from New York, who had gone South to join the struggle for black voter’s rights were found murdered. There appeared a man, a black preacher named Martin Luther King whose speaches explained the situation of the black man in America. He also said, a society with such deep corruption, it would be only a matter of time before we would all be victims—one way or another.
At this point, while still in junior and high schools around the nation, many of us were begining to realize that the assassination of Kennedy in 1963 may have been more than an isolated incident of one crazy man shooting the president. Looking around at things, like the escalation of our country’s military meddling in a backwater called Vietnam, the escalation of the Civil Rights Movement and a little thing out in Berkeley called the Freedom of Speech Movement—and the violent reactions our authorities took against them—it became to look more systemic, the reaction to a sick society that had become sated in materialism and celebrity—and would practice any form of national and international injustice to continue to feed itself these things. And it’s appetite was voracious.
And then they came for us. The war had escalated—a war 10,000 miles away involving an opponent of which had never attacked us and that had never been adequately justified to the American youth who had to fight it—to the point where the draft had been drastically increased, it became tantamount to impressiment, and every male one knew either go or justify himself in front of the local Selective Service Board—or dodge. One day you’re wending your way through student protests in the Quad pursuing a future as a teacher and wondering where you’re going to get the two-fifty for the latest Beach Boys album that your girlfriend is crazy about when you prefer the Beatles, and exactly eleven weeks later you’re up to your knees in rice paddy mud shooting and getting shot at by some “gook” and the guy next to you fumbles a grenade and nearly kills both of you. And you wonder what that girlfriend is doing back at college, so fucking far away.
We just wanted to see if there was another way, if we could really be the people we were told we were. We often threw the baby out with the bathwater, but because of my generation you now have a cleaner environment, a more realistic view of our history and who we are so we can fix ourselves, a better nose and determination to recognize corruption in our government instead of slovenly sweeping it under the rug, the Second and Third Wave of Feminism, and much, much more. Shareware is purely a “Hippie” idea. We probably wouldn’t have had home computers so early if it weren’t for Jobs and Wozniak and their use of Hippie or, more precisely, Yippee guerrilla tactics in getting the money to start Apple by building and selling little blue boxes that cheated the telephone monopoly Bell Telephone Co. aka “Ma Bell” out of long distance calls. Computers would have stayed exclusively within the corporate realm for a lot longer if it weren’t for them.
We just wanted a better world and we weren’t perfect by any means. For those interested, HERE is a remnant of what Time Magazine and other mass media called “Hippies.” We called ourselves Heads. The Farm are good people, but not everybody can live like this and they have evolved quite a bit since 1971 when they loaded up their old school buses and headed out from the Haight toward their new home on a piece of land outside a small town in Tennessee. They do good work and have made the community around them a better place than before they came. And that, I think is the core “Hippy” philosophy. I miss them greatly.
Damn good coffee today.
