The hippies had it right

[Mathematician]

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/05/02/915/

Go ahead, name your movement. Name something good and positive and pro-environment and eco-friendly that’s happening right now in the newly “greening” America and don’t say more guns in Texas or fewer reproductive choices for women or endless vile unwinnable BushCo wars in the Middle East lasting until roughly 2075 because that would defeat the whole point of this perky little column and destroy its naive tone of happy rose-colored sardonic optimism. OK?

I’m talking about, say, energy-efficient light bulbs. I’m looking at organic foods going mainstream. I mean chemical-free cleaning products widely available at Target and I’m talking saving the whales and protecting the dolphins and I mean yoga studios flourishing in every small town, giant boxes of organic cereal at Costco and non-phthalates dildos at Good Vibes and the Toyota Prius becoming the nation’s oddest status symbol. You know, good things.

Look around: we have entire industries devoted to recycled paper, a new generation of cheap solar-power technology and an Oscar for “An Inconvenient Truth” and even the soulless corporate monsters over at famously heartless joints like Wal-Mart are now claiming that they really, really care about saving the environment because, well, “it’s the right thing to do” (read: It’s purely economic and all about their bottom line because if they don’t start caring they’ll soon be totally screwed on manufacturing and shipping costs at/from all their brutal Chinese sweatshops).

There is but one conclusion you can draw from the astonishing (albeit fitful, bittersweet) pro-environment sea change now happening in the culture and (reluctantly, nervously) in the halls of power in D.C., one thing we must all acknowledge in our wary, jaded, globally warmed universe: The hippies had it right all along. Oh yes they did.

Of course, true hippie values mean you’re not really supposed to care about or attach to any of this, you don’t give a damn for the hollow ego stroke of being right all along, for slapping the culture upside the head and saying, See? Do you see? It was never about the long hair and the folk music and Woodstock and taking so much acid you see Jesus and Shiva and Buddha tongue kissing in a hammock on the Dog Star, nimrods.

It was, always and forever, about connectedness. It was about how we are all in this together. It was about resisting the status quo and fighting tyrannical corporate/political power and it was about opening your consciousness and seeing new possibilities of how we can all live with something resembling actual respect for the planet, for alternative cultures, for each other. You know, all that typical hippie crap no one believes in anymore. Right?

 

[Valjean]

Well of course...

 

[Pardus]

Cassandra's curse, noone believes you until they **** on the electric fence for themselves, and even then they'll probably turn off the fence instead of changing direction.

 

[Scuba Pete]

Great story Gene, and as a former hippy: Peace, love, joy and farrrrrrrrr outttttttttt!

 

[Valjean]

A "former hippie," Pete? Did you cut off your hair and forget your dreams? Did you abandon your religion?

Why?

 

[MysticSang'ha]

YAYYYYY!! :clap2:

Great article, Gene!

Although about the whole tongue-kissing thing..........what's so wrong with that?




Peace,
Mystic

 

[Scuba Pete]

My hair was down to my waist before I had it cut. I was SO anti war and pro earth, and actually I still am!

A "former hippie," Pete? Did you cut off your hair and forget your dreams? Did you abandon your religion?

Why?