What Are the Hippies Saying?
WHAT has caused many of these young people to embark on the strange and difficult life of a hippie?
When we listen to what hippies themselves are saying, a definite pattern emerges. What is that pattern? When asked why they have chosen this course of life, many hippies give the same simple answer: “WORLD CONDITIONS.”
World Conditions
Today, young persons are better informed than ever. They are very much aware of what is going on in the world. They see among the nations great anguish, injustice, poverty, hatred and hypocrisy. They see that world leaders often do not solve man’s problems peacefully, but drench the earth with blood. And whose blood particularly? You know the answer: it is the blood of younger persons. They are asked to pay the supreme price for the mistakes of others.
That is why John W. Gardner, a former presidential cabinet member in the United States, said: “This generation will not accept solutions that are precooked in the back room of the Establishment.” No, many young persons today simply do not accept the standard explanations for the horrible things that have happened in our time.
Typically, a young woman acknowledged that world conditions led her, and others, to become hippies by saying:
“I was from a well-to-do ‘nice’ home. But I moved out. Why? Mostly because it was so apparent that not only was hypocrisy and prejudice prevalent in the nice quiet suburbs, but I was more aware now of the completely apathetic, lethargic state that most people seemed to be in about world conditions.
“Couldn’t they see what was going on? Didn’t they know what was so wrong in the world? How could they just do nothing, not even think? I had to be where people were at least trying to find answers, even if their way seemed strange to outsiders.
“I can authoritatively say that this is what causes most of these young people to embark on this course, because I was a hippie. Greenwich Village, Haight-Ashbury, and a Hopi Indian reservation were among my homes.
“My involvement with drugs and the so-called ‘hippie life’ was not a ‘phase’ as my parents wanted to believe. Nor was it a weekend trip. I was totally immersed in the philosophy and habits of the hippie generation.
“Although my smoking marijuana started when I was 16, the disenchantment with authorities, parents, religion or anything ‘Establishment’ had already taken place. I had been active in our church and met with the assistant minister about my questions and doubts. I did not get any reasonable answers.
“So I turned my back on all religion and decided to ‘get the most out of life.’ Nothing meant anything anymore, and experience was the thing—the ‘god.’ I was searching, but I didn’t know what for.”
Her explanation is not at all unusual. You will find that it is common to many who become hippies.
However, some claim that world conditions have always been this way, so why should there be any more reason for people to become hippies than in the past? But world conditions have NOT always been this way. Never in the history of man has there been a century so filled with trouble as the one you are living in. As Mr. Justice Jackson said at the Nuremberg trial of Nazi war criminals:
“Two World Wars have left a legacy of dead which number more than all the armies engaged in any war that made ancient or medieval history. No half-century ever witnessed slaughter on such a scale, such cruelties and inhumanities, such wholesale deportations of peoples into slavery, such annihilations of minorities.”
Mankind’s problems have increased since Mr. Jackson said those words. As you know, it is now within the capacity of man to annihilate human life. And poverty, hunger, social unrest, racial and national hatreds, pollution, overpopulation and other problems are not diminishing at all. They are growing.
Worldwide Movement
It is not just a few people who are distressed by world conditions and who reject today’s society. They are to be found throughout the entire world, and in significant numbers. A writer in the Detroit News noted that there was never another time in history “in which the brightest kids in every nation on earth looked around them at the same time and said the hell with all of it.”
Mankind has never seen such an agony-filled century. Only those asleep to the facts deny it. But many are not asleep. This is why it can be said that not in the memory of living man has there been such a worldwide revulsion against the established way of life. A writer for the German magazine Der Spiegel said: “This applies to Capitalist countries as well as those professing state socialism.” He also noted: “Perhaps it derives its motivation from a deep-rooted weakness in the fabric of our civilization.”
Thus, increasing numbers of people everywhere, especially the young, are showing their disgust with this present system of things. Therefore, it is not strange that one form of this disillusionment should be the hippie movement.
But have not parents in our time given their children more of the better things of life than they had when they were young? True, in many lands the young today have better food, finer homes and more education than their parents had. Yet, the hippie movement is strongest where the living standard has improved!
Materialism
Since “middle-class” children are usually better educated, they are often more aware of world conditions. Their youthful idealism enables them to focus on the vital questions of the day. Also, they have not been so concerned with food, shelter and clothing as children from poor families; so they are more able to think of other problems.
However, the very improvement in a family’s living standard is part of the “deep-rooted weakness in the fabric of our civilization,” as Der Spiegel put it. What does material well-being have to do with many young people becoming hippies? One hippie from California well expressed their attitude. She had come from a family that lived in a $50,000 house, and she had her own inheritance. Of her parents she remarked:
“They gave me everything I wanted. I had my own car. But it was all so phony. Everything revolved around money. . . . So I just flipped out.”
Thus, to the dismay of their parents, many youths refuse to accept cold material riches as a substitute for the warmth of parental love, attention and leadership.
Hippies often are the products of parents who went without material things during the struggles of the Depression years after the economic “crash” of 1929. These parents were determined that their children would have ‘all the things we were denied when we were growing up.’ This was very noble, but often their quest for money was at the expense of time that should have been spent with children in their formative years.
Thus, hippies grew up in an acquisitive society. Money was made the god. In the rush, too many children got too much materially. To complicate the situation, permissiveness was the rule. Discipline became old-fashioned, or there just was no time for it. The main emphasis was on bettering one’s position in life.
Commenting on the hippie problem in Toronto, a Toronto Daily Star reporter said:
“The hippie movement is a forcible reminder of what we sometimes forget: Better housing, more jobs, higher education, cannot in themselves bring healing to people who have found life in the 60’s empty and inhumane. Only a reversal of values, in which men are accepted—in fact loved—unconditionally, will make life worth living.”
A New Society Wanted
So, to most hippies a new society is needed. They reject a money- and position-oriented society that tramples its fellowman instead of loving him. They reject a world in which there is so much hypocrisy, dishonesty, phoniness and inequality. As one writer put it: “The hippies hope to generate an entirely new society, one rich in spiritual grace that will revive the old virtues of agape [principled love] and reverence.”
Hippies do not see that any reform of the present order will accomplish this. So they feel that the way to individual freedom from society is to reject it and break its rules. They feel that there must be a liberation from the enslavement to materialism so that they can enjoy the simpler things of life, its beauty and pleasantness.
Therefore, money and work, associated in the minds of hippies with a corrupt commercial system, have been challenged as false gods. As one Canadian hippie leader stated: “Work isn’t everything, work isn’t holy.” They feel that work should be done when and if one wishes, at his own pace.
In the hippie world there would be little private ownership. All that is held would be for the benefit of the group. Even children “would be the responsibility of everyone, not only of the blood mother and father.”
In the hippie society marriage contracts could exist, but if one decided he wanted another partner he could “marry” that one too. Freedom to have sex relations with anyone is really their accepted standard.
Are many of these ideas shocking to you? Does the hippie rejection of all authority disturb you? Are you dismayed by their belief in having sexual relations with anyone they choose? Does their marijuana smoking and drug-taking seem too much?
To most persons, particularly the older generation, the hippie philosophy is extremely radical, unacceptable. Can you not hear some older persons saying: ‘Why, where did they get those foolish ideas?’
Well, just where do you think they got their ideas? Who is greatly responsible for their beliefs and behavior?