You’re reversing cause and effect. FM radio and coffeehouses aren’t a legacy of hippies. The existence of FM radio as an inexpensive alternative to AM radio, and the existence of coffee houses in gentrifying communities that sold cheap coffee and provided a gathering place and a place for folk performers were some of the things that led to the rise of the hippie movement. You could say that hippies are the legacy of FM radio and coffeehouses, but I like FM radio and coffeehouses, so I wouldn’t slander them like that. 
I suspect the reason why it’s so difficult to pin down the definition of hippie, and their impact, is precisely because of the profound effects they have had on society. The people at the time certainly had no difficulty in seeing them as a homogeneous group. That’s what was different then, that’s what has changed. There was a right way to think and act, and anyone who differed from the norm was seen as a problem. The hippies represented all causes which were seen as dangerous and wrong simply due to being a threat to the status quo. They fought for the right to believe in things which others saw as ‘dangerous new ideas’. Today it is easy to take that for granted.
But there were student protests here and in particular in Northern Ireland.
They all grew up, became parents, and turned into conservatives.
Oh, I dunno. Its a popular meme, and there’s no way to prove much of anything, so I’ve only got myself and the people I know, but no, not really. Its the kind of thing they use to sell cars these days: “Hey, you were pretty radical in your college days, but then you got your MBA…”
Some got waylaid by Jesus, but that isn’t so wierd when you think about it, there’s a lot of commonality between evangelical Christians and hippies. (I mean the joyous evangelical types, not the Calvinist tardo fundamentalists with stainless steel rectums that slam closed when they hear somebody laugh…) So thats more a shift in focus than anything else.
Mostly what happened was Viet Nam. It sucked all the oxygen out, it made for hard, hard choices, forced hippiness to evolve towards the counter culture, and political demonstrations are a stone drag, a duty performed. Lefty bloviating speech makers are still a bore, deluded into thinking that we are there to listen to them, like they’re telling us something we don’t already know. Some people would rather have a bull horn than a blow job.
But, for the most part, the people I knew then are pretty much the people I know now. None of them died from LSD, a couple died from booze. And so it goes.
The end of the Welfare State.
The social contract in the USA from 1945-1973 was built on the availability of citizens as workers & potential conscripts in the state’s project of global domination. Work for “the Man” & you’d be taken care of.
The youth movements (understandably) rejected this project in favor of, variously, peace, internationalism, self-determination, individualism, or iconoclasm. They dropped out, dodged the draft, & eventually became libertarians. They wanted to be left alone, distrusted powerful authority, & became fertile ground for the Milton Friedman/Ronald Reagan “anti-state” line.
The ruling class, for its part, abandoned a generation that spat at it & refused to kill darkies overseas for its power. And they offered even less to that generation’s snot kids like me.
I remember the music, the freedom to dress the way one chose, the closeness and the feeling of community. Mostly I remember the freedom to do your own thing.
We helped to bring about changes in the American culture; some positive, some not so positive, but change and experimentation.
I moved from straight jacket Dallas to the freedom of Santa Cruz, CA in the mid 1960s; it was like being granted a reprieve from a death sentence. The mid 60s to the mid 70s were probably the best years of my life, for a lot of reasons.
I can understand a hunger for intellectual splendor and cultural excellence, but Waco is only a hundred miles away…
I can’t believe some people are calling Starbucks a hippie legacy. Starbucks is basically taking all of the hippie-flavored spirit from the coffeehouse and leaving only a place to sit down (or run in) and get some coffee and or light snacks.
NTTAWWT. I don’t hate them or anything. Although I might if I enjoyed the “coffeehouse culture” because they aren’t a member of it.
First came the Flower Children: Gentle, generous and heavily into Eastern philosophy. Like the Beatniks a decade before, they preferred poetry to possessions, but unlike Beatniks, Flower Children were optimists. They were the original “Think Globally, act locally.” “Be kind to your Mother” and "all living things deserved respect.” I remember simple, comfortable and practical garments of natural fibers—(HEMP!) The styles were unusual, perhaps, but not necessarily strange. “Wouldn’t it be far out if everyone on the planet just got along? Peace and Love, man.”
They ate macrobiotic diets and drank carrot juice–and shared their brownies.
Then came what Arlo Guthrie at Woodstock called ‘a lotta freaks.’ This was the red-eyed fun-loving, colorful, counter-culture who ‘groked’ the philosophy of the Flower Children—even if they weren’t quite so pacifist. They flew whatever 'freak flag" [social cause] that caught their imagination, including the anti-war movement (Especially once the draft was imposed.) It was chaos as far as the parents and law enforcement was concerned but the more they tried to control things, the less they could. Some people even wrote nasty things about them.
Freaks where a bit more into “mood enhancers.” Drugs, including LSD were still more of a religious rite then, at least for some of us. It was a good time to go to the concerts at the Fillmore, openly pass joints and “Love the one you’re with.”
Then came everyone else and it was all sex, drugs and rock and roll all the time. “Let’s get high and screw.” Why work? Why bathe? Who needs philosophy when you have dope?(And the dope became crank and junk.
This is a broad brush, to be sure, but that’s how I remember it. YMMV.
I like to think that my g-g-generation advanced: civil rights, women’s rights, the sexual revolution, environmental concerns and anti-war causes. Our music brought anyone with a cheap Japanese radio together, and in a more enlightened and productive way than the ‘gangsta’ theme we can’t seem to shake.
On the down-side, I think ethnic pride and the disdain for authority went a bit too far.
Our tribe broke up into ethnic conclaves which now distrust each other at least partly because we don’t speak the same language…literally and otherwise. How much more smoothly things would go if we weren’t ‘hyphenated-Americans,’ but simply Americans with (whatever) heritage? Pride in one’s background is fine, even welcome, but intolerance is the world’s number one enemy today. (Or is it overpopulation?)
We don’t respect authority these days (and some would say, we have little reason to.) Our leaders lie seemingly without consequences, sportsmanship has been jettisoned and “Greed, for lack of a better term, is good.” As parents we haven’t supported even basic authority such as school teachers, cops or even Little League umpires. What’s with that?
On the whole, I think my generation has done rather well. That’s the way I remember it, but as they say: “If you remember the 60s, you weren’t there.”
Listen, kid, in my day Waco meant Baylor Baptist University and to my unschooled mind, the prospects there were bleak. Fort Worth was closer and one could venture out onto the Jacksboro Strip if one were really looking for adventure.
Ethnic pride? That had nothing to do with the hippie movement and it has been falling steadily for previous immigrant groups for years.
In the 60s, I knew guys who would get in fistfights over Polish or Italian or Irish jokes. There were neighborhoods where the majority of the grandparents frequently spoke the language of the country where their parents were born. There may be some newer immigrant groups where that phenomenon is true, today, but the majority of folks in the U.S. have lost nearly all their ethnc association beyond a a bit of cooking or a family tradition at Christmas.
The term hyphenated American is over 100 years old and it was originally used–as it is used in the current resurgence–as a slur during the last period of anti-immigration hatred.
That is simply not a legacy of either hippies or the broader Boomer generation.
As to the disrespect for authority: that was come by honestly and is no more a trait of hippies or Boomers than of any other group.
Disrespect for authority was certainly a hallmark of Boomers, (not just hippies), at the end of the 1960s, but at first it only affected those born after around 1948, or so. It started with kids being denied high school diplomas or being kicked out of school for wearing their hair longer, then escalated as kids were routinely hassled by cops or denied jobs for no better reason than that their hair might reach their collars. It spread as the government told lie after lie during the Vietnam War, culminating in the egregious abuse of power employed by Nixon and his staff–by which time the disdain for authority had spread to the majority of the population, regardless of age.
The abuse heaped on Little League umpires had a small source in disrespect for authority, but it had a much larger push from the wave of self-help books that came out, beginning in the early 1970s, mostly written by people who were between the ages of the WWII gneration and the Boomer generation–nearly all on the political Right–that promoted, (as it’s flagship title proclaimed), “looking out for #1.” Most of these tracts, anathema to hippies and liberals, promoted a self-centered approach to the world that urged that everyone was entitled to whatever they could get.
Did a disrespect for authority help plant the seeds of that movement? Possibly. On the other hand, the utter disillusionment in government that spread across all ages and most classes following the Nixon debacle and the fervor with which so many people of all ages and classes embraced the new “gimme” trend can hardly be attributed to a handful of scruffy college kids and dropouts who never had a clear message to begin with.
As to the legacy of hippies, I’d be hard pressed to come up with a real one, simply because there were so many different definitions of hippies, most of which encompassed a miniscule portion of the population. Someone living in a commune, (either an actual farm type attempt as communal living or at least a house where a number of people lived together while sharing their housekeeping), would get my vote. But while I knew straitlaced folks who considered everyone with hair to the collar or anyone who ever smoked a joint or anyone who wore clothing made from natural fabrics or anyone who engaged in “free love” to be hippies, I knew too many accounting and law students, (and police cadets), who matched those definitions to think that they were all really hippies.
The past tense in this thread is kinda funny to me as a boulderite. I am no hippie, but that movement is well and alive.
The greatest generation in the modern era is actually the Depression Era/WWII generation. They went through all kinds of hard core shit and made huge sacrifices so that guys like you could have the freedom to sit behind a computer screen night and day if you so choose.
You could also say that the emancipation movement for women began way before the '60s but it, the racial and political movements and the gay movements, all came to a head in the '60s. Trust me, you had to be there.
Yeah… um no. I respect what WWII veterans had to go through. Make no mistake. But they did what they had to do because a cartoonish supervillain was attempting to take over Europe and exterminate an entire group of people just because they were Jewish.
And the world stepped up to say no and stomped his Nazi ass down.
Are you telling me that wouldn’t happen today? If Osama Bin Ladin comes out of the desert and starts shooting his way through the middle east all the way to London, we’re just going to sit on our hands? Come on.
jakesteele’s point is that you claimed that the Boomers claimed to be the “Greatest generation,” when that epithet is already applied to a different cohort and there is no evidence that Boomers make any regular reference to themselves as “the greatest.”
This particular claim of yours was a straw man argument that is based on an error. That was jakesteele’s only point.
I think that lauding or blaming people for having been born at a particular time or place is silly and trying to set up “age wars” between cohorts is ludicrous, but if one wishes to engage in such activities, one should get their basic facts right.
Read back through this thread. Count how many boomers pat themselves on the back for “changing the world” by attending Woodstock or having sex before marriage or wearing their hair long. I don’t know how old you are tom, but I’m 27 and I’ve been having the specialness of the boomers crammed down my throat my whole life.
And honestly, I’m sick of it.
Personally, I think this whole “Greatest Generation” nonsense when it comes to people that lived through WWII is a response to the boomers going on and on about how much they changed everything. Some other group got mad and decided to play their own card as a claim to being the greatest.
Funny how the freedom to do your own thing seemed to end up with everybody doing their own thing in the exact same way. I don’t think anybody can deny the cultural changes the 60s generation brought about, but this whole idea that the movement was full of non-conformists is laughable, to me.
The most immediate legacy of the hippies that I was aware of growing up (born in '70; was constantly told how great the Boomers were) was the fact that they ended up voting Reagan into office.
Sorry. The Boomers get lots of credit and lots of blame for all sorts of things that had nothing to do with their personal characteristics and everything to do with the odd phenomenon that there are simply so many of them.
Gee, you’re sick of hearing how wonderful the Boomers are. Well. I am equally sick of hearing how Boomers are the worst thing that ever happened to the country, even to the point of accusing the Boomers of being responsible for characteristics of completely different groups*–and I have been listening to that nonsense for far longer than you have been alive.
If Boomers “stopped the Vietnam War,” (which they didn’t), it is interesting to note that about half the names on the Vietnam Memorial in Washington are those of Boomers. On the other hand, it held steady from the 70s through the mid-90s, (I have not seen a more recent report), that a larger percentage of Boomers than any other cohort actually participated in public service, even long after college.) Boomers are boomers just because a lot of people were really horny after WWII and the U.S. happened to have the mixture of an economy that would support large families, medicine that would keep kids alive longer, and no birth control pill to limit family sizes. If some members of that group take inordinate pride in their accomplishments, I would have to say that I see the same thing expressed by some members of every generation; it is simply more noticeable when such people are a percent of the largest group.
At any point, it remains that you misidentified the Boomers as the self-identified “Greatest Generation” and if you can’t get your facts straight, you are going to be called on it in this forum.
= = =
- For example, I see a lot of whining by younger folks about the Boomers “selling out” to become Yuppies, even though few Boomers were actually young enough to be a part of that phenomenon whch was typically a Gen X sort of lifestyle.
Yeah, that’s what we young folks call a “play on words”. I used the greatest generation line because that’s the way I see boomers speak of themselves. I know who it really belongs to, but I was being cheeky.
I’ll remember to talk slower in the future so you old folks can understand my newfangled way of speechifyin’.
Also…
The oldest Gen Xers turned 15 in 1980. I don’t think they were the driving force behind the yuppie movement. There’s plenty of blame to go around for that one with the boomers and the Xers.