As a kid my Dad really warped my perspective on Hippies. He was born in the 60s and loved the music of the 60s and 70s and he’s very Liberal. At first I used to think Hippies were the best people that humanity could ever bring forth: Peace-loving folks who love everyone and believe in preserving nature. And I still appreciate a lot of that sentiment, especially protesting the Vietnam War, but as I became a Marxist I became sorta disillusioned with the Hippie’s dedication to non-violence and how their “free love” was often used as an excuse to be a sex-pest drug-addled parasite who refuses to work. I don’t like Forrest Gump’s portrayal of Hippies exactly, it was written by a right winger, they aren’t all assholes and they usually don’t beat women for sure. Nowadays I can respect their anti-war sentiments and their pro-nature stances but so much of being a hippy seems to be a misunderstanding of what gets shit done. Also some Hippie music is great but FUCK jam bands, nobody’s trying to hear a song that’s as long as a full album and just repeats over and over again with slight variations. That’s all I have to say about Hippies, what are your thoughts?
spoiler
I am sure there are a lot of good hippies but, I can’t unsee a lot about a lot of hippies that I just can’t stand. A lot of hippies my age nowadays are just poor white lumpenproles (who I get along with well enough), or are insufferable typical middle class “leftists” who feel smug about their grand understanding of life itself. A lot of hippies my age don’t even have the decency to be good liberals, a lot have contempt for black culture (hip hop = violence) and instead choose to hang around redneck/country white supremacists, they overlap a lot with other brands of liberal thought where they think people who are suffering or who have problems are essentially choosing it because they have “chakra blockage” or “karmic debt” or need to “open their mind to the Universe’s love” or whatever the fuck else. Love for nature and peace from them feels less sincere and more like yet another way to feel sugary contempt towards those who are not as enlightened as they are.
I remember hearing during Civil Rights era, some Black Panthers met with some white hippies to try and chop it up. The hippies convinced them to try psychedelics. They were rudely awakened when taking LSD did not make the Black Panthers automatically defer to One Love pacifism above all else. They think their brand of pacifism is some divine mandate instead of what it is, the warped and naive dreams of the privileged who don’t actually understand how bad our enemies treat their prey. Pacifism can come no sooner than total overthrow of capitalism and the war machine, it is a post-socialist ideal not an effective shortcut to utopia (the general striving directly towards utopia with emphasis on aesthetics and cheap talk obviously has a lot of overlap with the similarly middle class corrupted morality-obssessed white anarchist).
I’m speaking both as a former psychedelic user and someone whose spiritual beliefs were partially informed by post-Abrahamic New-Agey spiritual practices, who loves nature and hates war.
I’m sure this is widely shaped by my experience with Carolina hippies, I am definitely no expert, I’m not some Deadhead who frequents interstate music festivals lmao.
