Perhaps the most ignored and disrespected group of people who happened along in the course of American human events are the "flower children" of the 60s and early 70s. And as a result 30 to 40 years later, we as a nation might be inconveniently worse off for that oversight.
Sure, there were those who over indulged in the "turn on and tune in" mentality and the easily accessible recreational drug culture. But we never did get away from people with that mind set. They're still around. Many are doing time. But they're still around with us. We still got em' by the droves. And maybe too, many from that long gone era got caught up in the pleasures of the flesh as they lay down together under the picket signs and posters that advocated "free love". Some people take things so literally. But we still have our share of people who live that way. Only now they leave behind a wake of marriages, children and divorces and there's precious little that could be considered free about their fickle promiscuity and the litigation over who will be the victor over the spoils of once common property. The court costs alone eliminate any idea that love is free by any stretch of the imagination. So life goes on in hypocritical fashion. But all in all the excesses of the hippie culture are still with us despite the bad press it was given by the establishment and the stalwarts of integrity such as the likes of the Richard Nixon White House.
Let's see what we might have missed in the exchange through closer examination of the ills America and the world are suffering in the 21st century.
War would not be the order of the day had the hippie movement won footing. Hippies were opposed to war and the extreme hippies leaned as far as preaching and practicing pacifism.
Global warming? Well, acknowledging that some people still deny that there is such a thing, as a nation we would have had a 40 year head start on "saving the planet" possibly making the question itself moot by 2008. Alternative energies such as wind, solar and methane would have been pursued by now by the folks who had already unplugged from the grid, used wood for heat and candles for light when it was needed beyond and between twilight and dawn. It was being done then. Why would anyone assume it wouldn't have continued and grown? I would have said "aggressively" pursued…but we're talking about hippies here. Aggression was an unspoken cardinal sin.
And while some will staunchly attest that we would be living in anarchy after 30 years of a hippie social paradigm, let me remind you that there will always be the adult equivalents of those who aspired to be both hippies and still run for class and school leadership. Control freaks will never become an endangered species. But had a few of the people running the show for us for three decades had been allowed socially to remain of the flower generation, we could in many ways be living in a truly gentler and kinder society in America.
Let me cut some of these things short by simply listing the current problem and the contribution that the "peace freaks" may have made to the contrary.
Obesity - macrobiotic/organic diets. Medical complications and the need for expensive health insurance - wholesome life styles and stress management through meditation, living in the moment and a little pot now and then. Credit problems, today's housing bust and the economy might have been prevented or lessened with the expansion of a barter system, communal living and self sufficiency.
I think, at this point you can sit back and come up with a few of these social improvements on your own if you really wanted to take the time for it. You don't need me to spell the whole thing out for you. I'm no Tim Leary, Abbie Hoffman or Baba Ram Daas.
The point is, today, in most every election or opportunity that we as Americans get to vote in, the question arises, "are we better off now than we were then"? And the nagging doubt that whomever we voted for in the last election really didn't contribute shit towards improving our lot, going back multiple elections is like something hiding in our collective anxiety closet.
Maybe we missed our shot. Maybe we would have missed Utopia any way. But maybe we could have gotten closer than we are now.
In 1969 we put a man on the moon. It wouldn't have happened if that possibility had been treated as the hippies had been. It would have been an impossibility that never got off the ground. But it came to pass. People believed in it as improbable as it was and it happened.
Who's to say that had we believed a little more at the time in what the hippie movement had offered, a more left brained social order, that we couldn't have come that much closer to putting ourselves in… or at least in closer proximity to that Utopia that everyone since the hippies thinks is and was so impossible?
The incredible irony is that as a hive we did and can find it easier to believe that we could put a man on the moon than for us to conceive that we could equally succeed at "doing our own thing", "loving one another" and realizing that we are all a part of the sum of the whole.
And all we had to do was simply "give peace a chance".
Why do you suppose it is more difficult for us to reach a little genuine, lasting peace on earth than it is to reach the moon??
Peace.
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