Why The Hippie Movement Died

The hippie movement never had a set of workable Ideas that everyone was subscribing to and attempting to develop into the worlds social frameworks. As it is now, hippies have varying beliefs that are usually at conflict with one another.

The main belief throughout hippies now adays is that peoples perceptions of the world are to exist justified and to be respected as soemthing valuable. This makes hippies now adays very passive about political change because politics is a dirty ass, corrupt and sneaky game where we have to press our ideas onto people to gain attention. This is probally why there is no hippie movement now adays, hippies do not actively seek to bring this to the mainstream people and their ideals. For example, the majority of youth go to clubs on the weekend and hippies stay away from those places. A true movement needs to seek out diversity and assimilate it, in this context hippies would have to go into these clubs and advocate hippie ideas into people. This just doesnt happen yet for various reasons.

the main reason this type of cultural intermingling doesnt happen is because now adays the hippie movement is very environmentally self-rightous and to gain status of hippie amonsgt other hippies one has to live a life of relative low material worth...this is not at all reconcilable with the culture at the clubs where heavy fees are asked, trasportation is nessecary etc etc.

Also there is an unspoken resentment between hippies for the mainstream and anything that is popular...hippies now adays are obssessed with originality, so much so that they are making originiality and freedom their chains, their conditions of love and as a movement this is fatal.

I personally believe that the movement could never acheive much but give a few people a way out of their social problems, temporarily. Movements now adays are crippled, though they are fun to analyze.

Ps. Ive been to a predominantly hippie school. Where I was immersed in that culture. It is got its kink and stink.

 

Hippie, hip, and so on are what some people be - not some kind of movement.

 

And when there were many it was a time like no other time - not a style or political movement - but a time of unparalled beauty and growth. Things change. I'm not seeing the amazing energy of that time, but there's a lot of good things happening and a lot of hip people around.

 

The hippie thing was not a style...? I disagree. Yes, they were there because of the time. It was a clash between new and old things of the kind that only happen once in a while. Hippies were just an aspect of that though. It was just a subculture like most others.

 

Drugs.

 

Takes more than drugs to make a movement, otherwise there would be a crack-ho and meth-head movement on at this very moment.

 

the draft was over


bring it back

 

All I can speak with much authority about was my experience and it was that I and the people I knew entered what felt like a new and beautiful reality of experiences and relationships and all that. Certain things were common, like LSD, people living together, seeking peace, so on & so forth. I guess I'm thinking of the word "style" as having kind of a superficial sense. To me, what I was doing seemed true to destiny, not like thinking about style or what I should wear or how I should wear my hair. My whole life has opened out from there.

 

Funny , but I never realised that it HAD died , it just seems like we Hippies got older , and mellowed out , and are just too tired to fight against things like we used too.
SO , we turned all that energy towards our homes , and our families , and do what we can to make our portion of the Earth the paradise that we wanted all along.

 

To tell the truth, I think the hippie generation was really spoiled. They had everything they could possibly want-- jobs were easy to get, the standard of living was high, a working dad could easily support an entire family without needing a university education, or a post-graduate education... and he wanted to get those things, they were very affordable and he didn't need to plunge himself into debt.

AND yet, this still wasn't enough for them. They wanted to not have to work, to be able to do drugs, to be able to discover themselves spiritually, they wanted to have other people do all the work while they watched... all of those things that are basically impossible for people in their 30s nowadays. Protesting Vietnam was mostly just an excuse, if you ask me. Suddenly everyone cared about a bunch of people they had never met, in a country they would never go to and knew nothing about??? Come on-- that was more about self-importance and 'sticking it to the man' than actual concern.

Hippies just wanted to live in a perpetual state of hedonistic pleasure with no responsibilities, no worries, no cares-- just sex drugs and music.

I think the hippie movement is directly responsible for a lot of the bad things about our society-- drug use, teen rebelliousness, self-righteousness, teen pregnancy, the sexualization of teenagers, horrible work ethics... actually, the hippies were like those guys who come to your party, get wasted, trash the place, then wonder why your house is so messy.

The only things I respect about the hippie generation are respect for nature, the politics, and some of the music... the rest of it is kinda sad. If more people had been hippies, or if it had persevered, then I think there's no question that we'd all be totally and irreversibly @#$ed right now.

 

heywood: I have met alot of people like you in my life and one thing I have learned is that once you have made up your mind there is not a thing I can say or do that will change it . So thank-you for your input .

PAX

 

truth is the movement was infiltrated and spoiled from the inside.
just like the hippies made a concerted effort to either not let the establishment change and affect them, or to change the establishment itself, the establishment made concerted efforts to change the movement, or at least affect it.
they won for the most part, but a few of us won too, and are still winning today.

 

I've met an awful lot of self-described hippies that didn't care about nature, had ultra-right politics, and liked Merle Haggard music.

You can go into any culture and find people who do not truly adhere to that culture's philosophy. You can hold those guys up as examples of how that culture is false... but that doesn't make it so.

Although it may be true that oppulance played a part in allowing the hippie movement to prosper (after all, free stuff and panhandling require a certain amount of disposable wealth) it hardly defines the movement. And it hardly makes the movement illegitimate.

If there had been more of the true hippies, it might have been irreversibly beautiful.

The bad drugs (other than pot and LSD) were favorites of the "non-hippie" hippies that infiltrated the movement for their own pleasures. I call them anti-hippies.

Teen rebelliousness is a good thing, IMO. Everyone needs to have ideals.

You may have a point about teen pregnancy, but then again, teens were part of that fringe element, mostly.

I'm not at all sure what you mean by "Sexualization of teenagers".

The work ethic was pretty solid, IMO. You never saw so many people working for nothing more than to take care of each other. Today's work ethic is all about how much you can stuff into your own pocket.

The guys who came to the party and trashed it were the anti-hippies.
In fact, most of what you've sited was the work of the infiltrators. They're the ones that the media got hold of and held up as the reason why the hippie movement was false. Apparently, you've bought into that image, as well.

 

^^^The hippie movement is directly responsible for 'anti-hippies' as well. And if you ask anyone today, including a lot of kids on this site, I'm pretty sure they would say that being a hippie means having long hair, taking drugs and listening to the Doors... like it or not, that's the legacy.

I'm not going to say that some hippies weren't alright people or even that they didn't have some good ideas, just that the hippie movement ultimately changed things in a negative way as opposed to a positive way.

 

I'll tell one of the negative effects of the hippie movement...Richard Nixon's reaction to it!
He hated hippies and basically waged war on them.

None of the the negative shit you mentioned about hippies destroyed American lives (with the possible exception of hard drugs) quite the way that the policies of Richard Nixon did.
Nixon was a fuckin' speedfreak himself! Look at him during watergate... sweaty, pinpoint pupils, reported bouts of paranoia....
Yet it was Nixon, the Republican pawn of big business interests, who brought down not only the Hippie earth movement, but the fashionable psychedelic drug culture.


When Nixon took over in February, 1969, he immediately began a program designed to tear down the American Hippie movement and drug culture. Mostly because big business decided that it could no longer allow a movement that was forcing it to stop polluting and spend billions of dollars cleaning up the environment.


I guess the positive thing that came from it all is we all got(get) to see the true colors of our corporate controlled "political leaders". Even some of them are sell-out hippies.
It may unfortunately be too late now to fight them. The hippie ideology is far too scattered. The original Hippie/Earth movement may have been our only hope of saving the environment.
We may have already blown our only chance.

ZW