Last night I watched a special on PBS about the music of the 60’s. Fabulous music, a fabulous era. As I was singing along to The Mamas and The Papas, Strawberry Alarm Clock et al I started to wonder where it all went wrong.

Society was pulsing with a desire to be more, do better back then. There was an alternative to the way the world was traveling, a road less traveled if you will. Wars could really be ended, peace and love could really win out. There were so many people involved in this mindset, it wasn’t just a few left of center types out there. Momentum was growing! Everything was possible!! And what happened? Nothing. Apparently the mid to late 70’s and the 80’s came along and all the hippies cut their hair and got jobs on Wall Street and forgot about the very things they were trying to do in the 60’s. Sure there are still a few left, mostly in SoCal or New Mexico, but there’s not this wide sweep of peace and love there used to be.

So I got to thinking. And then I started surfing. Surprisingly, there are quite a few websites and forums where this topic has been discussed. It was eye opening to say the least. I guess it’s easy for me to sit here and say “nothing happened” but in many small ways, big changes did take place. I think the main thing was that life happened. The “hippies” got older and had kids. Now, I will never say that having kids makes it impossible to live in an alternative way. Having a family just makes it a bit harder to do that, and a lot easier to buy into our overly consumeristic society that just wants us to be automatons. I think many hippies fell sway to this thinking; the thinking that you have to have a full time job with a fat 401(k) and send your kids to good schools so they can get into good colleges and there’s no other way. It’s easy to fall into that trap I’ll admit. Then there’s the issue of all the posers who took hold of the coattails of the hippie movement because it was fashionable or “cool”. These people really had no interest in changing the world, they just wanted the street cred that came along with being a hippie. You still see this today. Visit hippie sites and there are people on there who make you go hmmmm. On many sites, former hippies take issue with the term hippie itself; they say they were called “freaks” and not “hippies” and the term itself was media created. There’s even thinking that the alignment of the outer planets had something to do with the radical changes that took place in the late 60’s.

I guess overall I’m sad that this movement didn’t take more of a foothold. Just listening to that music and seeing the passion these people felt for their cause…it was awe inspiring. I’m sad that more young people today don’t see a way out, they don’t see that there are options other than birth-school-work-death. I’m sad that it looks like we’re moving in the opposite direction; we’re governed by a very conservative faction of an already conservative political party. The really frightening part is that there had to be some former hippies voting Republican last year, a fact I cannot reconcile in my brain of brains.

The really funny part I see is that there is still hippie bashing alive and well some 35 years after the fact. Those who buy into the status quo lock, stock and barrel seem to still need to tell us just how wrong this alternative mindset really is. No really! Mindlessly working your life away, buying all kinds of things to make you happy from cars to pharmaceuticals then realizing they don’t make you happy after all is the American way dontchaknow! I really liked a quote I found on one of the sites: too soon we grow old and too late we grow smart.