Are you at home in America ?

I feel as if the United States is the birthplace of the hippie. I also feel as if America is one of the few cradles of democracy. Maybe I live in a vacuum or a fool's paradise. Stem cell research is squashed. Unwanted war blazes overseas. Gasoline prices are through the roof. There's hatred breeding for undocumented persons. There's hatred and mistrust towards Muslims. Americans are angry at Israel related to the treatment of the so-called Palestinians.
What's a hippie to do? In my own way I have found a new career and lifestyle that allows me to say every day, "I'm here to make a difference." I garden and grow my own vegetation, fruits and herbs. I raise eggs from hand held hens. I work in a hospital and make sure that everyone in my care is attended to.
My hippie lifestyle is surmised only by the cars I drive (1960s and 1970s vintages)... perhaps some folks assume I'm either poor or cheap. In any event, I haven't had to have smog checks in decades.
While I'm horrified by the current executive branch that resides in the White House, I can honestly say that there is probably no where else on the planet I'd rather live. Even tropical rainforests and jungles have preditors that wouldn't mind snacking on some hippie butt.
What about you? Happy to be here ?

 

strangely, yes. if i wasn't, i would have nothing to fight for and i probably wouldn't have lived long in another country because of my Hoffman-esque BIG MOUTH. =]

what i am not proud of is what this country has become. and how it's ideals have changed so much over the course of 200 years. From honest and true presidents to paranoid and retarded presidents. It is a shame.

i really appreciate what you are doing, Duncan. Thank you. Thank you for rising above the norm and saying "Hey, I want to make a difference and I CAN make a difference."

thank you again.
*hugs*

 

yeah yeah all nice

America and democracy!?
You have to be kidding me.
People are fooled every day BY THEIR OWN GOVERMENT, and i'm sorry to say that thay still beleve that they have the power. It's just sad.

 

I live in Canada, and I can say I'm happy to live here. Despite all the problems, it's getting better...and we are a lot more progressive than you guys.

 

We all need to make our own paradise within ourselves and with the people we love...because no government or country is perfect. I think about moving a lot because people here are/can be ignorant and materialistic and..you know. But it's like that most places, yeah? And there are other problems other places. Education, medicine, whatever.

At home? I'm at home wherever I can find a place to sleep and people to laugh with.

 

I hate america, the only thing keeping me from going straight up to canada as soon as possible is the dance companies here. America sucks, its pretty dam close to
Russia, the only difference is (i don't know that much so this might be wrong) we can protest stuff we don't like (not that it ever does any good these days). Everyone is killing and hating and abusing resources and mother earth. it just sucks here. people are preoccupied with gay rights and abortion when they should be worried about getting our troops home. And the blaitant miss interpretations of the constitution never cease to make me insane. omg!!! hearing some old lady call this "a christian nation"...if i had had a gun, i would have put a bullet through my head right there.

 

American counties want me in jail

 

ri

How America is close to Russia????? Thay have like nothing incommon.
And you can protest like in almost every country in the world, peacfull protests are alowed with low.

 

America is not the start of the hippie.

America is the only place where people are dumb enough to take different individuals with some key moral values and label them something derogatory such as "hippies".

...and shit... the people here actually accepted the label!... while people everywhere else can live being free and peaceful without needing to attach a completely idiotic label to themselves.

America, I am disappointed with you... even though, I have never been impressed.

 

Greece was here thousand years before America, so as many other European countries who fought for democracy for centuries, so no, America is not one of the few CRADLES of democracy.

 

The term “hippie” itself became a universal term in the late sixties. It originated in a 1967 article in Ramparts, entitled “The Social History of the Hippies.” Afterward, the name was captured by the mass media as a label for the people of the new movement. (Yablonsky 28)

Ramparts was an American political and literary magazine, published from 1962 through 1975.

Founded by Edward Keating, under the influence of editors Warren Hinckle, Robert Scheer, James F. Colaianni, and others Ramparts became associated with the New Left. In contrast to most leftist publications, Ramparts was expensively produced and graphically sophisticated. It reached an audience that may have been put off by the grittier "movement" publications of the time.

I do of course realize that Greece had democracy long before it got a foothold in America. However, we have had the same form of government in practice since its inception. How the executive branch chooses to trample upon it as of late is something that the 2008 elections will hopefully fix.

 

He was trying to say that there were people with hippie lifestyle long before some magazine gave the label "hippie". Giving that label in 1967 doesn't meen that the hippie started there or then.

 

Riiiight.........

 

ok, go on...

well, what's weird with groups that accept a derogatory label with pride and make it their own? that's no big news. it happened with the afroamerican, it happened with gay people. it's a form of reaction. so what?

in other words you jumped right to disappointment without passing through illusion that's a good move in relation to a country which 'is the first to have gone from barbarism to decadence without the usual intervening period of civilization'.

 

It's an awfully idiotic and weak form of reaction... and for some reason or other it is so completely predominant in the US, while it only spreads to other countries through the shitload of US based media.

Anyhow... how are gay and afroamerican derogatory?

Yep.

 

I live in Finland and won't move from the nature for any price.

 

USA gives me no special "hippie-desire". Of course it's there where things happened and some great music comes from, but I can be peace-loving and nature-loving here where I live. And better in a place where I feel I belong, though just not precisely this place, but this country.

Muitakin suomalaisia Terve.

Finnish nature is my second home, my peace away from people and madness.

 

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back it's sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?
I'm trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I'm doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for
murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there's going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right.
I won't say the Lord's Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over
from Russia.

I'm addressing you.
Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It's always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie
producers are serious. Everybody's serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.

Asia is rising against me.
I haven't got a chinaman's chance.
I'd better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals
an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles and hour and
twentyfivethousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underpriviliged who live in
my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I'm a Catholic. America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his
automobiles more so they're all different sexes
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they
sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the
speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the
workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party
was in 1935 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother
Bloor made me cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have
been a spy.
America you don're really want to go to war.
America it's them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She wants to take
our cars from out our garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader's Digest. her wants our
auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.
That no good. Ugh. Him makes Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers.
Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
America is this correct?
I'd better get right down to the job.
It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts
factories, I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.