just for the record, there certainly were a lot of people in it who were just flea-ridden, druggie free loaders, users, predators, parasites, perverts, frauds, grifters, con-artists and scumbags, but you can say the same thing about any other cultural group or movement, including the Republican Party.
I remember 1969: I was in grade school, I had short hair slicked down with Vitalis and wore peg leg jeans and did not sprinkle lots of “cool” and “groovy” into my speech. I was hassled to no end by my peers the guys of whom had long hair (a la Beatles 1966 not a la Beatles 1972), bellbottoms peace sign necklackes etc.
“Do you own thing” as long as the “own thing” is the same thing everyone else is doing, huh? Fad-following robots.
I came around to embrace the movement as it had been but as Dio and others have said, a lot of the superficially visible “hippie” stuff was superficial conformity to “this is what’s happening today” and those folks all left to go do disco in a few more years.
That does explain a lot…
Having come of age in that era, I agree with your post. I would also add that music was huge and unique. There has never been a generation, before or since, that has had such a huge impact.
Also, for you young stoners, the hippies brought dope mainstream (close, anyway) and broke through a lot of barries to do it. See “MJ, Assassin of Youth” sometime.
Also, environment and health issues such as nutrition less invasive medical procedures whenever possible. Vegatarianism was brought mainstream came from the hippies.
The most important thing from the hippie legacy is that that generation was the first to adamantly oppose the govt. and stand up to it. It brought a much greater awareness of political and social issues.
For the record, the majority of people that called themselves hippies weren’t. At best they would be hippie-lites. They espoused all the philosophy but there were only a small percentage that truly committed all the way.
I did go on a war protest march in Seattle ONCE. I was stoned on acid and chanting, “Hel, no, we won’t go!! Ho-Ho-Ho Chi Min.” I thought I was kewl.
:dubious:
What about the generation that came of age in the 1850s and '60s?
To say nothing of those who lived in the 1760s and 70s. Or even the 1920s and 30s with Hoovervilles. Or the 1950s with the Civil Rights movement.
The hippies were a course correction to a country that had become increasingly insular and anti-communist. The Vietname War, the Cuba embargo, and the isolation of China are examples. All of these really backfired on the United States in the long term. Of course communism really did suck, and they oppressed their people, but anti-communism as expressed by McCarthy and his ilk was a massive over reaction that made Americans less free. Withouth this course correction we might have seen America become more like imperial England
Hippies were more international, frequently having travelled abroad. They were from the first generation of Americans to which higher education was broadly available. Despote being a white movement, hippies integrated a lot of different cultures into main stream America. Indian mysticism, English mod culture, black jazz and blues, traditional American folk music, and asian philosophy.
Their interest in healthy food eventually turned into an interest in better food that used real ingredients. Look at Alice Waters in Berkeley fir an example. The back to the land movement turned into people again having small farms that produced high quality products sold directly to consumers.
Some of the things we see today that are the result of hippy culture are:
Farmer’s markets, independent presses (e.g., Zines and graphic novels), Starbucks and the prevalence of espresso drinks, art films, gay rights, womens’ rights, sushi, the PC, FM Radio, and indie music.
You have to look back and see what was happening in the 50s and early 60s. America was cecoming bland. Kraft cheese replace real cheese and cooking was opening a can of mushroom soup to add to a dish. Small businsses were being replaced by large corporations. Family farms were being replaced by factory farms that had to change the nature of tomaoes so they could be shipped a thousand miles without damage. Large companies such as IBM and ATT were becoming more dominant and stifling innovation. Popular music was drek like “How Much Is That Doggy In The Window” and Lawrence Welk ruled the airwaves. Real traditional American culture was being replaced with the Disney version; it was like The Stepford Wives.
Wait, you’re giving hippies credit for FM radio? FM radio was invented by and the FCC pushed into accepting by this guy, who as you can tell by looking at, is just the stereotypical hippie (and who died in 1954, btw).
As for Starbucks and the prevalence of espresso drinks, that’s largely due to one person, Howard Schultz. who grew up a poor kid in Brooklyn and went to Northern Michigan University on a football scholarship, graduating in 1975. In 1982, he went to work for Starbucks, and after a business trip to Italy, tried to get Starbucks to introduce espresso drinks. When they wouldn’t, he started his own coffee company, and then, in 1985, bought the company from them and introduced espresso drinks. Schultz was also never a hippie (and hippies aren’t even the stereotypical consumers of Starbucks).
FM Radio had an incredibly small market share. College stations, public radio, and alternative stations exploited the fact that it was cheap to get a license and stated a whole new format of album oriented rock. FM radio stations were the internet of the 60s hiipies. It’s where you heard more liberal news, learned about what concerts were coming up, where the anti-war rallys were, etc. In Boston, if you were a hippy you had WBCN on all the time. I’m sure there were equivalent stations in SF, Ann Arbor, Austin, etc. Hippys and colleges students were the people who bought stereo systems that could make use of the low-noise, stereo signal. There was a convergence of technology (FM itself, LPs, stereos) and culture (long-form rock, the anti-war movement) that came together to change the nature of radio.
Starbucks didn’t start the espresso/coffee shop culture in the US. They were all over Boston, Greenwich Village, and San Francisco before Starbucks. Coffee shops were where beat poets read their poems, where Dylan, Joan Baez and other folk singers got their start. They were the town halls of the hippys. Starbucks just brought espresso to the masses. They opened their first stores in the city, not out in the suburbs. Like a lot of things that people take for granted now (like sushi in every friggin’ grocery store) it spread from something that only a core group of hip people did to what suburban soccer moms enjoy.
The hippies (and most baby boomers) love to claim credit for changing the world.But they are wrong.
The world did change—but not because of the hippies. It changed because of the enormous improvements in standard of living.
By the 60’s, most urbans kid had lived their entire lives at the highest standard of living in histroy. With no financial difficulties, always secure, and always with plenty of food in the refrigerator.
Lets compare earlier generations, for contrast:
–in the 40’s nobody had refrigerators, and so most people routinely went to bed a little bit hungry at night; Not because they were poor, but because there was no junk food. The last slices of bread had gone stale (no plastic wrapping, and no preservatives.)You had to wait till tomorrow to buy more. RESULT: You lived with patience, and there was no reason to fight the system. No hippies…
–During the 50’s, life improved. Families began to buy their first refrigerators, their first car, etc…Now, bread stayed fresh longer, food was plentiful, you could drive Dad’s car to the school dance.
RESULT: a few kids lost their patience and tested the system, using their new freedoms (greasers in black leather jackets, drag racing, etc). Other slightly older kids became beatniks—the seeds of hippies
–By the 60’s, life had improved even more. Almost all urban teenagers could afford their own car, their own record collection, and,–for the first time in human history—their own apartment, with a refrigerator full of fresh bread and junk food.
RESULT: Widespread social change. Not just a few hippies, but a wide slice of society, mostly young, lost their patience and wanted to test the system. Using their new freedoms, and with no supervision,they naturally wanted to try forbidden things, which they wouldnt dare to do back in their parent’s house.
So people experimented, and found out that life could be fun.
The earliest experimenters (say, 1964-1966) were labelled as hippies. But they didnt cause the revolution in lifestyles.They were just early adopters of the economic boom which everybody was participating in.
It was suddenly easy to live a lifestyle that had been impossible only a few years before–when your dad held the keys to the only car in the family, and your mother had to work hard to prepare the food in the ‘ice box’.
The hippies and baby boomers love to claim credit for creating today’s free lifestyle. But they didnt create it–it created itself.They just happened to be alive at the time when the economy allowed a new type of freedom that had never existed before.
For proof–compare different countries. Some countries experienced the full-blown revolution of “The Sixties”. But some countries had poor economies and were completely uninfluenced by it.Yet they later became just as “liberated” as the USA.
Compare the summer of love 1967:
Students in America, France and Germany were holding demonstrations, discovering sex and taking birth control pills.
But Ireland was a Catholic theocracy where students were quiet,(and nobody was allowed to enjoy sex 
). Spain was a dictatorship, where nobody dared to demonstrate or try to express any freedom. Israel was at war fighting for its life, its campuses closed because ALL students were called up to their military units, and spent the “summer of love” holding rifles in foxholes.
Yet all 3 of these countries, a decade or two later, developed economically to the level of America and France. And, guess what happened?–with no hippie “revolution”, they just casually adopted the same lifestyle as America had. Because when people have enough money to live well, they choose to live as free as they can.
And if they all have private bedrooms at age 18, they’re gonna have sex. You don’t have to thank the hippies for inventing that concept.
And they served coffee, not espresso.
All I know is that when I got out of high school in 1974, I wanted to get a VW microbus and cruise around the country, finding myself and picking up hot girls who placed a higher priority on painting their bodies than with shaving their legs. And I couldn’t, because gas was so scarce that it cost upwards of fifty cents a gallon.
So the legacy of the hippie movement appears to be that they used up all the gas.
From here.
I just want to say that a refrigerator full of bread is the most bland, depressing thing I can think of.
IT wasn’t something, it was everything. It wasn’t that Ward Cleaver didn’t know any black people. It wasn’t that Mrs. Cleaver had an orgasm and called the doctor to find out what was wrong. It wasn’t that Ricky Nelson’s rock n’ roll was to Chuck Berry’s as Coors Lite is to Jameson’s. It wasn’t that Maynard G. Krebs was the presumed buffoon, that made more sense than anybody else. It wasn’t attending churches with all the spiritual depth of a balloon animal.
You couldn’t be against something. You couldn’t fix something. Had to be everything.
There already was a counter-culture, the beatniks. The hippies turned it on its ear, the beatniks were sullen, joyless, and resentful, hippies were colorful clowns in motley and rags, beatniks had irony, hippies had joy.
Yes, we utterly corrupted western civilization. You’re welcome.
I can think of something yet more depressing: not having bread. 
The main legacy of the hippies appears to have been to prove that excessive pot smoking in youth leads to delusions of grandeur in adults.
Peace on you!
You could say “The Internet” has changed life as we know it and it was created by a bunch of army dudes in the early 60s. Something tells me there wasn’t a hippie in the bunch.
The civil rights movement saw its beginnings in 1947 when Jackie Robinson broke the color line in Major League Baseball.
The gay rights movement began with the Stonewall riots in 1969. Part of your generation yes, but how many hippies took part?
There is no greatest generation and I’m really tired of the Boomers constantly saying its them because “they changed the world”. Bullshit.