Real Life Hippies

But most prof's won't be able to tell you how good a bath outside in the bush is when it is snowing.

 

I was a "genuine hippie," so far as that term has any real meaning. In high school, I protested against the Vietnam War, smoked pot, tried mushrooms and took psilocybin and LSD with my friends. I grew my hair out long and I still have a beard. I lived in several communes, worked in a "hippie restaurant" at night and did my conscientious objector duty in a hospital during the day. I worked on an "underground newspaper" as a writer and cartoonist. I hitchhiked all over the U.S., Canada and Mexico and rode freight trains from 1970 onwards. I was a student radical, went to art school for a year and I was an anarchist and an atheist.

In 1976 I became angry and disenchanted with all of that and I felt like everything I had done up to that point was bullshit. So I quit smoking pot and joined the Marine Corps. It was sort of a life-changing experience. I had just felt like I was wasting my life and hiding my inability to do anything successfully behind this counterculture façade. After the Marine Corps I went to collegel and then got into Harley-Davidson motorcycles, but I don't ride anymore.

 

Of course you do. The sun rose in the east today, didn't it?

Willingness to do something doesn't give you the ability to do it.

A nineteen year old who has never lived away from home before can learn a huge amount from a wise old prof who has keen insight and a shitload of life experience, and has high expectations for his or her students.

Most middle-class kids come to college having been indoctrinated quite a bit by society, the media, and their parents. The first big challenge for the professors is to get you to unlearn all that garbage; stop making so damn many assumptions that are based on third-hand information, or worse. The second is to convince you that they aren't going to tolerate lazy thinking. In other words, if you take a position on an issue and haven't done your research to support it, they're going to nail your ass to the wall. The next step is to broaden your exposure to a zillion different points of view that you haven't been aware of in the past, and then learn how to see and understand biases and self-interest motivations inherent in everyone's perspective. And every step of the way, they're going to point out your mistakes, without mercy.

You haven't had this experience, so you don't know what it's like.

I'm talking mostly about university core curriculum classes, mostly freshman and sophomore level. Upper-level classes in your major are mostly job skills.

In general, it bugs me that an anti-education bias seems to be creeping into a movement that started out at liberal universities in the sixties.

 

Hey brother, I do understand how you got to this point. Most ex-hippies, it seems, are into insurance, banking or the stock market. Maybe I had success with the hippie philosophy because it came down to me from an older generation. But at some point I did change my focus toward spirituality.

 

I don't think I personally know a hippie... I live in a neighborhood of yuppies, scattered with some hippies. But the rest are anal soccer moms and tourists coming to check out the many, many 'antique' shops.

 

I am a real life hippie. Although I am not sure if any of the hippies on this site, or at these festivals you go to, are real or not. There are a lot of posers these days.

The fad may or may not die, but I will probably live forever.

 

I guess thats the internet- we have to just trust that people speak the truth. It aint bout the festivals or comments on drug taking- -If you read into enough of someone comments, you should eventually be able to determine enough insight into thier real ideals & values.
Then again, maybe not :hat:
jack

 

Hippier than thou...Who says?

 

- wrong thread

 

I was just kidding, I don't even know what being a hippie entails. I imagine I'm more of a free-spirit, drizzled with some hedonistic sarcasm sauce.

That may or may not have been a great description of myself.

 

Did you expect that of them?

 

Yes.

 

Looking at it from that viewpoint, the Tea Party seems to be the new counterculture, where communes have been replaced by underground bunkers and assault weapons collections. Scary thought, isn't it?

Now, just as then, some of the older, weed smoking professors with gray ponytails have a lot of insight, but this time they aren't having much luck finding new followers. The students of today are too financially enslaved to rebel.

That's very unfortunate, partly because it's hard to fight for the right side in the global warming debate if you don't understand any of the science behind it. Less educated people are also more susceptible to religious fundamentalism, and all the social and political manipulation that goes along with it.

The world is an immensely complicated place, and we need to know as much about it as we can, if we hope to make anything better.

 

Karen,
Salvador Dali commented on the , "Cretinisation of the masses." in 1933.
Informed discussion is ridiculed on the TV.

Good post.

 

it bothers me that ABC/ commercial TV is taken by trivial people who look stupid making "informed opinions" on news that the proles will see as being worthy of watching.