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Why are hippies disrespected?

M

Mycotheologist

Bluelighter
Joined
Apr 8, 2012
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141
I'm tripping on 5-MeO-DALT right now and it seems pretty clear that hippies are the coolest bastards alive.
 
Smear campaigns mostly. Portraying them as lazy, good-for-nothings to society.

The truth is that the hippy generation produced today's corporate executives. No wonder they want to keep drugs illegal. It would prevent you from getting as creative as they did :P

I respect people who live a grassroots way of life.
 
What is a hippie? It's a reference to a movement your fuckin grandparents probably started in the 1960s....I saw the dead a few time in the mid '90s and even went to jail in '97 for LSD...I eventually realized that pretending to be a hippie was "Gay as Fuck" and did my own thing more pertinient to my own generation! In 2012, if you're still out there claiming that "AWW, I'm a hippie bro!", You're at least three times as much of a fucking tool as I was when I was 18! Get a fucking life and create your own scene!
 
I think that the primary legitimate discreditation stems from the failure of the counter-cultural movement. It failed to build into any sort of sustainable mode of resistance; it failed to truly transform the bases of society in its image. Instead, it dissolved mainly into vapid hedonism. The failings of the more overtly political resistance of the period (with its roots tracing back to the SDS) intertwined with the failure of counter-culture. Organizations stemming directly from the SDS and those influenced by it failed to build a coherent, sustainable political critique, and descending into cult of media celebrity, absorption by counter-culture, or isolated, unsuccessful propaganda by deed (the later often connected to splinter Leninist groups).

Still, it was a good try.

ebola
 
^agreed

the hippies turned into yuppies and went against everything they believed in. It was a facade of a movement, that much is clear. though there were some benefits to it, it didn't sustain itself. In this regard, hippies are fake or phony.
 
RobotRipping said:
^agreed

the hippies turned into yuppies and went against everything they believed in. It was a facade of a movement, that much is clear. though there were some benefits to it, it didn't sustain itself. In this regard, hippies are fake or phony.
Click to expand...

Heh don't forget how the yippies (members of the Youth International Party like Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_International_Party) became yuppies and into everything they claimed they were against.

I have a friend who was big into the counter culture movement of the 60s and 70s, and he told me how with he and his hippie/artist friends they thought the yippies were silly, didn't represent them or anyone in the counter culture, and were idiots.

According to Peter Coyote, the co-founer of Diggers in San Francisco, Abbie Hoffman wasn't really a radical at all, in the sense that Coyote thought of radicalism. He wrote: "Abbie, who was a friend of mine, was always a media junky. We explained everything to those guys, and they violated everything we taught them. Abbie went back, and the first thing he did was publish a book, with his picture on it, that blew the hustle of every poor person on the Lower East Side by describing every free scam then current in New York -- which were then sucked dry by disaffected kids from Scarsdale."
 
nice info, not a big surprise. That right there is why hippies are disrespected, though i guess they shouldn't all be at fault for the actions of a few.
 
People are basically too selfish for the "take some love, and pass the rest on" to work. Also the weed the got too strong for people to do more than get off their couches.

Dank indica ruined the movement Imo.
 
lol i think methamphetamine ruined it tbh, read about it back then, it just took over. There were other social issues occurring at the time which contributed as well. Timothy leary didn't help things either.
 
Ebola mentioned the cult of personality that developed out of the counter culture, and I agree that that's a huge failing of it.
It is simply another way of sucking an authority's dick, which the movement strove to fight against. I think it's asking way too much for a huge population of people to go against their own nature. Maybe a counter-culture that has any chance of success must be necessarily well managed, and kept from getting too big. Of course, those at the forefront of whatever culture are going to try and cash in on their position just like anyone else, so it'd be hard to convince them they are part of the problem when their message hasn't functionally changed at all from the outset.

PS: You're right about the harder drugs, and it's certainly hard to stand firm when you're shaking hard for that next fix, but I think getting a kid on heavy indica early on will do something to his creativity and drive. I'm not a believer in laziness being good for anything. In that sense give me meth over indica any day.....
 
RobotRipping said:
Timothy leary didn't help things either.
Click to expand...

Blatent CIA asset placed inside the movement to subvert it. The counter-culture movement was a serious (potential) political threat to the establishment. As always it is far easier to destroy a movement by co-opting it through internal leadership than it is to physically fight it. Leary kept people floating up in the clouds instead of building a proper resistence to the establishment. It amazes me that people still buy into his bullshit today!
 
I consider the term hippy to be too broad to be really useful. That said, while there are things I like--even admire--about self-proclaimed hippies and bohemians, there are a few issues that bug me:

1.) They criticize consumer culture while turning a blind eye to the luxury of free time and money required to engage in their pursuits.
2.) Many are no less narrow or judgmental than conservatives; only the side of the issues is different.
3.) They are romanticists at heart. The world, however, is not very damned romantic, and sometimes the most painful or unwholesome choice is the only good one.
4.) Many are afflicted with a self-centered antipathy (or apathy) toward established channels to power and influence that perpetuates the same injustices they rail against. Weed was legalized in CO and WA by people who got off their asses and voted, not by the people who gave up on the system as hopelessly corrupt and unworthy of the effort necessary to change it.
 
Why are hippies disrespected? You could write a whole book on that subject. You've just been given a lot of valid information touching on many of the social influences and cultural changes since Woodstock.

I liked hippies. I also liked Vietnam vets. (Sometimes those were/are one and the same.) But Woodstock is no more. Hippies no longer exist as a social group. Love is dead. Peace is dead. Hippies are old people, born after WWII and now in their late 50s but mostly in their 60s. Some survive into their 70s but those folks probably started out with the beatnik crowd.

If I could, I would resurrect them. I would love to see the hippies as they were, holding sit-ins, protesting the war, actively fighting for civil rights, giving the establishment heart attacks.

That is all history book fodder now.
 
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