You know it’s true. All this hot enthusiasm for healing the planet and eating whole foods and avoiding chemicals and working with nature and developing the self? Came from the hippies. Alternative health? Hippies. Green cotton? Hippies. Reclaimed wood? Recycling? Humane treatment of animals? Medical pot? Alternative energy? Natural childbirth? Non-GMA seeds? It came from the granola types (who, of course, absorbed much of it from ancient cultures), from the alternative worldviews, from the underground and the sidelines and from far off the goddamn grid and it’s about time the media, the politicians, the culture as a whole sent out a big, wet, hemp-covered apology.
The Green Party and its predecessor, the Green Movement, played a huge role here too. I may bash the GP in the US for organizational problems but both worldwide and in the US, Greens were talking about recycling, organic food, global warming, and alternative energy long before it entered the national consciousness.
Hippie was where it started (yes, I was a hippie) and the Green Party was the leading edge for those ideas into politics and the mainstream. Take a bow, Greenies, you’ve earned it.
(You don’t believe the battle is over? Read the next post…)
I think hippies may be getting just a bit to much credit here. Certainly they popularized (or repopularized) many of these ideas. But the first hybrid automobile was patented in 1905. Minority religious sects like the Amish and Mennonites have been practicing many of these ideals for centuries. The Hooterites and other religious groups lived in communes long before it was cool (many still do). And the Beatniks were already at it before hippies ever appeared on the scene.
As for marijuana, it was smoked everywhere before some yo-yo got a wild hair up his ah, nose and decided it was wrong around 1937. (FDR was the one who made it illegal. Thanks, liberals!) That’s only one generation that it was out of favor, man!
Yes, I have a little resentment: I was too young to be a hippy, and didn’t even discover the psychadelic music scene until after Janis, Jim, and Jimmy were long gone…
Hooterites? Great name. Who were they?
Sure, it was a continuum, lots of things led up to it, but the explosion of culture and politics that happened in the 60’s changed the culture inalterably.
NOTHING is unalterable, Bob! Even in the pliable US….