It's been a half-century since the peak of the movement, but looking back what do you think about it? For some people, I know it's had a lasting effect, but for some others it's just a relatively meaningless blip in history. I have my opinions, but I'm interested in what others may think.
While you're contemplating this, hear's a tune that you might enjoy from that era:
Well, I started kindergarten in 1969, but I was living in a rather conservative neighborhood where hippies weren't particularly well liked. (I would come to find out years later that our town police department had a reputation for harassing hippies and giving them a hard time.)
My mother sympathized with the hippies and the anti-war movement. My father didn't agree. My mother also started going back to college to pursue a master's degree in theater arts - which attracted a good many hippie types. Eventually my parents broke up. Some of my dad's drinking buddies in the neighborhood talked a lot of smack about the hippies and their pot-smoking, while they were knocking down martinis all night. Weird bunch.
What really stuck with me, though, was the music. I was too young to understand politics or the actual issues of what was going on, but I did take to the music early on. My childhood listening included Chubby Checker, the Kingston Trio, Winnie the Pooh, and In a Gadda Da Vida. My mother also got the soundtrack to "Hair" which was kind of a catchy tune, which is also something I picked up on early. That is, I could tell that a lot of people didn't like it when men wore their hair long. Nowadays, no one seems to care, but back then, a man with long hair was just not looked upon very kindly.
Case in point, when I was about 6 (1970), my eldest cousin (the daughter of my father's eldest sister) got married to a young man who had hair down to his shoulders. Two doors down lived my other aunt and uncle, who was a decorated WW2 veteran. He reacted quite negatively to the whole idea of his niece marrying some hippie, so he boycotted the wedding. He made a point of it, as the wedding guests were walking past his house to the church, he was standing out front, watering his lawn.
For me (and probably most kids at that age), one has to be wary of the "bigger kids," and that's what the hippies were from my point of view. And with numerous adults in my family seeing them as "deplorables," it probably colored my attitude towards hippies early in life.
As I grew older, I began to understand the political issues a little better, but any semblance of any widespread political movement had pretty much dissipated by then. Of course, there were still a lot of guys with long hair (including myself and older brother), but most people had grown accustomed to it and didn't care anymore.
What a long, strange trip it's been.
