Hippies

 

When I was a kid, ten or eleven, I was a hippie wannabe. I was too young to be a hippie. But hippies were cool. They were so free, so liberated. I think all my friends wanted the same. It was the late Sixties and hippies were in the news and we could see them around town. Two of my older siblings may have had leanings that way. The third sibling definitely did not.

I did not do drugs and had no plans to ever start. But drugs were not what made you a hippie. Hippies seemed so cool because they were cool by definition. The word hippie comes from “hip.” You had to be hip to be a hippie. Hip was a word coined by an earlier group of outliers called beatniks. Beatniks were a group of poets and artists, and musicians who had the “beat.” Beatniks coined the term “hip.” Beatniks were clear outsiders. They were scoffed at or made fun of by the mainstream population. But some of that attitude of not caring what the mainstream thinks of you, carried on to the next generation. It turns out not worrying about conforming is very freeing. That, coupled with a cause -- the growing mess in Viet Nam -- found the ranks of hippies swelling. The establishment didn’t take the beatniks seriously because there weren’t very many of them. They made fun of them.  But the hippie movement grew to a point that it could not be ignored, could not be just laughed at. A fundamental shift was taking place, the younger generation shifting away from the older.  The older generation did not understand the hippies. People fear what they do not understand and often attack what they fear.

To me, a kid, the larger sociological implications of this shift were lost. I simply saw people that I wanted to emulate, people who cared about the environment, who cared about social justice, who cared about freedom and tried to live free. I was less certain about the Viet Nam War protests. I had been raised a patriotic American, and what was happening in the war was confusing to me.

Hippies were not monolithic. Some did drugs, not all. Some believed in free love, not all. Some were Marxists, not all. Some were Christians; some were atheists; some were Buddhists, etc.  So, what kind of hippie did I want to be? I guess if you had pinned me down, I would have said I wanted to be a sort of  a conservative hippie (as if that weren’t the most ridiculous oxymoronic term you ever heard). My friends were all of similar minds. We were socially and environmentally aware. We loved the idea of freedom. We talked about how when we graduated high school would pool our money together an buy an old school bus. We would convert it into living space and travel the country, all of us, in our bus. It was a romantic notion. No rules. We would just make it up as we went.

It's fine to fantasize about such things when you are eleven. When you get a little older the practicalities start to sink in. Hippies did not worry about practicalities, right? But they started coming unbidden into my mind. It’s all well and good to say you would save up and pool your money, but it would not take long for money to run out. Then how are you going to buy fuel? How are you going to buy food, toilet paper? And one thing I kept coming back to: can you imagine what that bus would smell like after a few weeks?

By the time I was old enough to be a hippie, hippies were waning. They no longer had the cool cachet for me that they once had. I still carried some of that idealism, but I found myself planted firmly in the mainstream. And that was okay. It’s okay to fight for a better world from within the system. That was who I was at that point in my life. Not such a free bird, perhaps a bit boringly conventional. But I think it worked out for the best. The road that was not taken was probably the road that was not meant for you. 

Star Liner