A hippie practice you'd like to see come back?

Speaking of hitchhiking, let's see, on one long journey...
Started hitchin from Circle, Alaska down to Dunedin, New Zealand via Maui (where I hitched for years). Then back to Auckland, to Sydney, hitchin from there to Cape Tribulation.
That was just the start....

 

3D printed synthetic skin-covered AI robotic frames and lotsa folks won't even leave home...

it'll be the first time in history women won't have to get messy and clean up after guys, or listen to them whine (unless - of course - those male robot lovers double as vacuums on all fours)...

guys? I'm afraid you'll really need to rubber-up or you'll be doing a lot of cleaning once you've finished playing..

 

James Michener's book CENTENNIAL (and - in late 1978/early '79 - the 22 hour miniseries of the same title based on it) factor Long's Peak into the storyline (as Beaver Mountain)..

you can see the BEAVER approaching summit from left flank

the story (excluding Michener's requisite geologic history) covers the period 1795-1976 and the people/events revolving around a fictitious settlement originally called Zent's Farm on the South Platte River (near present-day Greeley, CO)..

both formats are worth exploring..

I'm a book/imagination guy and know the area..

the miniseries is well-done, with just about every major 1960-1975 TV series star and those who would become well-known 1980s TV stars in the storyline..

 

The dating apps and sites suck. I have no kids but I really feel for people who are college or university students both in the 2010s and 2020s as they rely upon apps, and friends with kids I can tell which ones socialized with kids their age, and which ones are iPad kids.

 

There are head-shops here in the Northeast but I think a lot closed due to pot being legal or decriminalized for personal and medicinal use, Amazon, and Covid.

I am not sure where you are from, in the Northeastern USA HIV/AIDS was around in the early/mid 1970s and by the late 1970s had spread to the West coast. I am bisexual and knew men in SF who were very sick with “cancer”, GRIDS, or what is HIV/AIDS. A bisexual male friend that was in NYC and NJ in the 1970s and 1980s swears HIV/AIDS spread so fast and rapidly there from people sharing needles, and cocaine use and anal fisting and unsafe anal sex. His older brother had a friend in his 30s that injected drugs that died of “pneumonia” in 1974. My bi friend never got it as he is much more into getting oral sex, not into getting anal sex, and started using condoms in 1978 for giving anal sex to avoid getting gonorrhea. He first heard about what was later known to be HIV/AIDS in 1978.

A bisexual male friend from South Africa said in his country AIDS was already there in the 1950s.

 

I'm referring to the Hippie era of the 60's. By 1975 Hippies were graduating school and entering the work force. Mostly because 'Nam was over. It wasn't until 1981 the CDC reported AIDs cases in 5 gay men from LA which is the start of the epidemic. This was long after the Hippie era was over which peaked during the 'Summer of Love', 1967.

This century head shops aren't nearly the same as a 60's head shop. Lots of them were forced out of business due to new laws brought down by "The Establishment" prohibiting the sale of MJ paraphernalia. Bongs, water pipes, and rolling papers plus other stuff were outlawed. Even roach clips can fall into that category. A lot of these ordnances remain on the books today.

 

I visited San Diego last year and The Black was still there, doing a roaring business.
We still have head shops here in Portland Oregon, but now they have to compete with the dispensaries, which sell both pot and paraphernalia.

 

You're right, it is closing after 57 years.
https://www.reddit.com/r/sandiego/c...ack_in_ocean_beach_is_closing_after_57_years/

 

And Freak Brothers Comic Books, and the others, Like Fat Freddy's Cat. I still have some that I bought at Head Shops

 

It saddens me at times that ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE can sometimes answer my questions with greater accuracy than I myself could. I posed the question about what the practices of the era were or might have been. This is what popped up.

"Hippie practices, emerging from the 1960s counterculture, emphasize rejection of materialism and conventional authority in favor of peace, love, and personal freedom. Core, enduring practices include eco-friendly, sustainable living, communal existence, holistic wellness (yoga, meditation), natural food consumption, and anti-establishment activism.
"Key aspects of the hippie lifestyle include:

• Sustainability & Nature: A strong commitment to environmentalism, living "off the grid," using solar panels, and maintaining a "green" lifestyle.
• Diet & Health: Promotion of organic, vegan, raw, or vegetarian diets, as well as the use of homemade, non-toxic products.
• Spirituality & Wellness: Focus on inner peace through meditation, yoga, mindfulness, and, historically, the use of psychedelic drugs to expand consciousness.
• Expression & Fashion: Embracing a bohemian style, including colorful clothing, long hair, dreadlocks, and barefoot living to enhance grounding.
• Community & Freedom: Creating communal living arrangements, prioritizing "free love" and open relationships, and attending music festivals like Woodstock.
• Social & Political Action: Active participation in protests against war, inequality, and government authority.
• Spiritual Exploration: Seeking guidance outside traditional, Western, Judeo-Christian norms, such as through Hinduism, Buddhism, or astrology.

"Modern interpretations of these practices, often called "New Age Hippie" or modern hippie, often focus on wellness, minimalism, and eco-consciousness."

 

Underground Newspapers and Underground Bookstores.

When Trump was elected the first time, I looked around my basement for an old Mimeograph machine. I thought I had one, and a gallon jug or two of mimeograph fluid. But it was my dads, and I couldn't find it, so I assume it was in his basement and disappeared after he died. But I thought I might have to revive the tradition of an underground newspaper...

I used to hang out at Denver's underground bookstore----the RIP bookstore. Here is one of the bookmarks I still have from them, and you can see what RIP stood for:



It was a cool place to hang out and share ideas with all kinds of acitivists. There were undergrond newspapers, and magazines, books, bumper stickers, buttons... There were a lot of Marxists, but you had anarchists, and Democratic Socialists, and all kinds of left leaning people. And of course there was a fair share of hippies there. I had a hard time understanding where I fit in politically. I tried the label of Utopian Socialist for a bit, but realized that was not me. I found a few books there by the Russian Prince and Anarchist, Kropotkin at the RIP, and realized that he was probably the closest to what I thought politically-----he believed that mankind would evolve into an anarchistic state of Mutual Aid. I don't know if you could get more hippie than that in politics.

In the 70's, Evangelical Christians started pushing this slogan, I Found It. So I made a t-shirt that said, I found Kropotkin. It started a lot of conversations.

One of the friends of the family hosted a German exchange student for a year, and he wanted to meet American hippies. So they introduced him to me. At first I thought he was a left wing German student, but he would say things that were a little off. He wanted to go to an underground bookstore and so I took him there. He bought a book or two. As we left I asked him, How did you like it?

He, responded, "It was interesting but I was disappointed.

What? Why were you disappointed?

Well, I looked everywhere, but I did not see a single Mein Kampf.

Suddenly it all fit together---our conversations, his jokes, and the ideas he shared. He was a Neo-Nazi! I told him, you won't find that at an underground bookstore---they have it at a regular one, and I took him to Walden's where he bought 5 copies. He explained that Mein Kampf was prohibited in Germany, and he was going to smuggle them back. Apparently he thought activism of any kind, including here in the US, would fit alongside Neo Nazi activism in Germany. I was guilty of the same bias in that I thought his interest in activism and so forth put him on the Left. He had some strong notions about social class and so forth, but I thought he was just being German. From that point on, until he went back to Germany, I tried to convert him to the Left.

 

A somewhat unidentifiable or nonspecific embarrassment, disgust, and rejection of sitcoms such as Father Knows Best, and Leave It to Beaver, even as some of us almost obsessively watched them. (well, they were funny, but...)

Think about it-----our generation had the near-fascist conservatism of Post World War America to rebel against. But when our kids, and especially our grand kids, rebel, what kind of America and the social norms of that America do they have to rebel against? We didn't normalize the revolutionary world we experimented with, but we certainly impacted our society immensely. This may have something to do with the authoritarian problems we must face today.

I recently heard a discussion on how Charlie Kirk, if I'm not mistaken, argued that it was rebellious to go to church. I guess it is rebellious to fight for White Supremacy, and racism, and what not. Perhaps this is why the world seems so upside down right now...

 

Yes they did, and this is why the embarrassment, disgust, and rejection was unidentifiable and nonspecific.

The values they shared were the morals and values that made America, and the hippies so loving and giving. Why women would feel sorry for you standing in the sleet as Mountainseed talked about. I too watched them regularly. And they certainly reflected the innocence of the time---such as the shock of the nation in the early 60's when Life magazine reported on some kids that trashed a beach house, or something like that------things that America today, or even by the 1970's, wouldn't even notice.

Therefore it didn't quell the teenage angst of what was the biggest demographic to ever be pushed through our society up until then, like a large mammal making its way down the digestive track of an anaconda.

As good as the values were, they presented a plastic version of the world---a version in which you wouldn't be sent by your own government to die in a jungle in what was an absolute living hell in the Vietnam War. They masked over the existential discontent that ran through a society where affluence was finally obtained, yet so much was missing, and the only choice was to try to fill the holes that were missing in endless and meaningless cocktail parties, pinochle nights, and church on Sunday mornings. They certainly masked over the world (while at the same time reflecting it) where the white male was dominant and the conditions of life for people of color was horrendous, and swept under the rug.

So we said, "No! We don't want that!" And tried to change things. But we never actually solved those problems. Even racism, which we thought we were doing pretty good with, was simply repressed into the shadow of our collective unconscious until it could fester enough to resurface. We did lose our innocence, and that was it.

Not that it is the role of entertainment to always resolve our existential realities. We would hope that it would often provide an escape from this.

But this is what we had had to rebel against. And that was pretty good. What do our children and grandchildren have to rebel against----a society of Married with Children----but because all we really achieved was taking away our innocence, and created a world that fell short of providing those good moral values, what kind of rebellion would they channel into?

Perhaps a Right Wing push towards authoritarianism. Americans seem to be good, generally speaking, of failing to take responsibility for their own lives. But those were part of the values that were instilled within us baby boomers. After all, the generation before us saved the world from fascism. So we rejected authority, and tried to take on that responsibility. But our kids and grand kids were not raised with those same values. So they didn't even have a foundation to seek that responsibility over themselves. So they will just hand the responsibility over to someone else----a church, or an authoritarian figure to rule the country...

 

Perhaps this is the dynamic that shifts our nation's pendulum from right to left and back again. Or perhaps it is the mechanism by which Empires fail.

 

I marched on Washington DC when I was in college (mostly for gay rights). I also marched in protests against the proliferation of nuclear reactors in the United States. And I subscribed to Mother Jones and Mother Earth News. These days I don't protest because no one can secure my safety. I'm sad that it has come to this but I am not naive about the nature of the force that part of the DHS culture.
DHS came into being shortly after the destruction of the WTC in New York City and other acts of terrorism against the USA on or around 09/11. It looks as if the current administration is creating its own terrorism force.
So, back to my original question... WHAT HIPPIE PRACTICES SHOULD COME BACK IN VOGUE ?

 

Hippie jackets-----military coats and fatigues painted with day-glo paints.

I worn mine to its second protest today-----I just spent the last few weeks making it, and wore it to a protest last Sunday, and again today. Numerous people asked me how I made it, and one guy said he will seriously pay me $100 if I can make one for him. I could not find the day-glo paints that we used to use but I think they are still around. But they do have fabric paints that are the same thing.

It is a big hit at the protests! Wait, I think I already mentioned that in this thread. I will post some pictures of it, now that it is completed for the most part.