what does being a "hippie" mean to you?

Woah. That's deep.

 

I stumbled onto the forum while Googling something. Found several posts and interesting people and signed up after a few months of trolling. I was around for the hippie scene in the 1960s but not an active participant except for the music, love and pot.

 

Sounds like you were an active participant to me

 

I missed the hippie era, being born in 71 and all... But to me, today, it means being a naturalist to a better extent. And by naturalist I mean whatever comes naturally... It can be a clothing style mixed with a pacifist demeanor along with kindness shown to everyone, bare foot and flowers in the hair or any combination of things... "being" a hippie is a feeling, not so much a dress. It is in the actions, not the words. Drugs are not a requirement. Of course not having been old enough or even born during the height of the hippie "revolution" I really have no idea what a hippie was then. I know it was peace not war, which I think is still good for today! Being a naturalist in this sense just means being true to ones self and doing no harm to others. To me that is "hippie" - ish. Peace

 

I signed up because this place seemed to have a decent amount of site traffic & I liked the forums.

 

i think the roots were iconoclasm and pacifist activism, which evolved into civil rights activism which evolved into environmental activism.
long hair was a way of expressing iconoclasm. and weed, was an alternative to beer and booze, because kids wanted to play with mind altering substances without becoming alchohaulics as too many of their parents and other close relatives had been and didn't want to follow in the footsteps of the abusiveness they'd witnessed comitted by people under the influence of alky.

this is what i can say for people i knew myself and my own influences. your own milage might very well vary, but that was mine.
their older brothers and sisters had been beatniks, and there was a shameful war against the choices of people in far of south east asia, by a country that claimed to be about freedom, to protest, and because if you were male and graduating high school it was drafting you streight into the army, unless you could run away to canada or get some kind of deferment,

the next best thing to either of those, for someone who's parents weren't rich, had never been out on their own, and the canadian border was just a wee bit too far to walk, was the air force had this inactive reserve thing where they could snatch you away from the army getting its paws on you. which is how i came to be a veteran and have a pension from the v.a. now.

as mentioned previously, i don't really think of myself as anything other then an awareness that observes and attempts to avoid deceiving myself in the process.
i found this place surfing nostelgia about woodstock, summer of love and all that, which was really some kind of apex for/of what hippie meant, or again what i thought it did.

i have interests, forests, feral creatures, and my first love was little model trains when i was one year old. growing up in the 50s, science fiction came next.
i also grew up in the woods, and my dad hated cities, except as someplace to go shopping for things you couldn't find in the stores in the little towns and villages we lived in or near.

and basically never lived in a city, until after i got out of the air force, and then, at first, very small cities.
so yah, we didn't have personal computers yet when i was in high school, that didn't exist until after i got out of the air force and was almost 30.
it wasn't until the whole thing was almost over with in the late 70s that i discovered weed myself, and my flirtation with mind altering substances didn't last much past the early 80s.
during which i became involved in the fandom of literary science fiction, from which modern furry fandom spun off (though unbeknowst to me at the time, it has also been already evolving out of commics and comix fandom)

so whatever anyone thinks anything means today, my interests are what they are, and that's about the long and the short of it.

 

were you the only person to actually ask jeeves something? i always kind of wondered what kept that search engine around for as long as it lasted.

 

ask jeeves is still around? Why?

I didn't go in for the long hair, the clothes, the flowers or the poetry. I was working part time to pay for college and employers of the day didn't accept that stuff.

 

I haven't conducted a survey but maybe I was the only person who used it. They kept it alive all those years just for moi, aw

 

We have morphed from "Ask Jeeves" to " Google it" !!! lol

 

Out of curiosity, I "Googled" the definition of hippie... here is what I found...
hip·pie
/ˈhipē/
noun
noun: hippy; plural noun: hippies; noun: hippie

1. 1.
   (especially in the 1960s) a person of unconventional appearance, typically having long hair, associated with a subculture involving a rejection of conventional values and the taking of hallucinogenic drugs.

 

I resemble that remark...

 

As do I minus the hallucinogens..

 

Yeah... I ran out of drugs too.

 

I didn't run out... I just figured out that life was fun without them! lol And I could remember it if I wasn't messed up! lol

 

Can't deny it, me too. Although long hair has become so normal in my parts its not unconventional anymore. Rarely til never partake in hallucinogens anymore either but I used to.
One can match the whole description but still not identify as a hippie btw

 

So true!

 

I enjoy psychedelic music and drugs, which I associate with hippies, so that played a part in me signing up. The psychedelic forums were much more active at the time.

Since the psychedelic forums are practically inactive now, I guess I come here out of habit? I dunno.

 

Same with the music subforums. I guess one can only argue about the Stones vs. Beatles for so long

 

That's because The Dead were way more far out