DFH, whatever you want to call them, all I know is, for years now, the designation of HIPPIE, DFH, etc. has been held as a shield against any and all criticism on Daily Kos, be that criticism of policy, user, ex-hippie, politician, whatever,
There’s a problem with all this hippie love and defensiveness, however: a lot of us weren’t hippies. A lot of us were too young to be hippies or revered Civil Rights workers and couldn’t see any real, meaningful relationship between them and hippies, so could not quite bring ourselves to become hippies because it didn’t make sense to us. The divide was too deep.
Not only were we too young, though, there were other problems. A lot of us had older siblings and neighbors and relatives who died in large part as a result of the excesses of what the hippie movement quickly became. The hippie movement was a bright shining star for what seemed 6 months, then heroin. Speed. LSD. Bad wine.
A lot of us knew people who went to jail, even prison, because of the excesses that became part and parcel of being a hippie.
We even knew early on that we were too young and would never be skinny enough to be accepted as a hippie, and if we were accepted, we would be forever burdened by the denotation of Earth Mother, meaning sexless, overweight, probably a good cook, possibly someone easy enough to crash with when the skinny people---the real hippies---were angry or otherwise unavailable. The price of having boobs.
But we grew anyway, with some of us becoming punks in our younger, more foolish years, and when people incessantly blared Grateful Dead at us, we stared at them blankly. The world was crashing around us, and you wanted me to mellow out and join you in your … your … whatever it was? We’d seen too much at that point. We’d already seen too many burnouts, deaths, wealthy leftovers vaunted by the tragedy of their pasts, revered for being A Real Hippie by the older ones who couldn’t figure out what had happened, where had the past gone? Well, the past had gone where the past is supposed to go: into the past.
Disco dancing was fun, though, I’ll give you that, especially when the really good disco dancers started learning salsa and teaching everyone else how to salsa dance. And I do appreciate the introduction of the burrito into our common foodagraphy.
However, we the un-hippies grew up, stopped being punks and didn’t vote for Reagan, loved the idea of solar even though we really couldn’t quite figure out what it was back then, and moved on with our lives, getting married maybe and even divorced and moving on and on until we finally found something to do with our lives that made sense outside of the societal constraints imposed on us by various older people, including maybe most especially the hippies. Most of us don’t even really remember being punks, even if we did it for a few years because we had to move so fast because the world was changing so quickly and we knew even then that the promise that was offered to so many others wasn’t ever offered to us. The options just weren’t ever really there. So we had to make do with what we had, and many, maybe most?, of us have done really well with it. It never made sense for any but a very few of us to hang onto being a punk. Why would we?
Besides, we’d seen the looks we’d gotten from the respectable hippies for associating with people not of the right religion or not of the right race or not of the right cultural background. We knew. We knew what their eyes said and what they whispered when our backs were turned.
So, no, not all of us did well with money or joined the socially acceptable realms of counter-culture, but looking back, most of us who veered into punk did well with our lives. We sat at the sides of family and friends while they died, and we knew that’s what life is, and we accepted it and didn’t demand cruel over-medicining. We can’t all live to be 100, after all. Our homes were never McMansions, but some of us did managed to create beautiful homes and beautiful lives, even amazing art and literature and philosophies that no one could believe emerged from that.
We had our own time. We’ve grown past it. We don’t need to hang onto it for dear life, hang out to our youthful beauty and power or even revere ourselves, and we sure don’t feel the need to revere hippies. To live means to keep moving. We’re not punks anymore. We’re just people.