How to be a hippie movement revivalist.

SpaceChive · Mar 3, 2008

I agree with most of what you say: to revive the hippie movement we need to come together with philosophy and thought, not only with the outer appearance of the hippies that used to be. It would be shallow and useless if it was just the musical and appearance related aspects of the hippie culture that returned. We surely still have hippies around, with ideals of peace and respect for one another, but we must unite to bring across a positive message.

audrakp · Mar 8, 2008

I have to agree with all of you who advocate for a change. The way things are going on right now are not right. Wars are going on for what purpose? People aren't taking the environment as seriously as they should. I'm from Northwest Indiana and it worried me this year when in January we had tornados being reported in the Midwest. I think it odd considering that usually there should be snow on the ground in January, not tornados. Mother Nature is not happy and everyone needs to start doing there part and taking action to save the planet. We are the future and if we want there to be one, we need to do something about it now!

~Lets all band together and fight for something that will benefit the whole planet, not just corporations and governments!

groovecookie · Mar 8, 2008

:applause:^

audrakp · Mar 8, 2008

Thank you. I'm sure a lot of you know feel just as frustrated about the situation as I and want to do something to change.

Helter-Skelter · Mar 13, 2008

I saw a really good quote the other day. Not sure who thought it up...

"Why do people kill people who kill people to let them know that killing is wrong?"

Dancing_Sun · Mar 14, 2008

in regards to the 1st post. good job man , it seemed like you needed a good rant! You raised some really good and really real issues that we sometimes forget. You're right hippies are not of the past there are a lot of hippies out there. We need to unite

peace and love to all!

majikstranger · Apr 21, 2008

Death of the Hippies is a complete crap. I agree with the poster. We still live and we still crave the same heaven envisioned in the 60's. The only thing we need is reformation, concentration, and a plan. Hippies detested the "system", i agree. However i do not see the system as the enemy. Those who want safety and a governmental Daddy should have their way preserved as that is the only way they can function. The important factor is when will we create an alternative system that is viable. Sustainability and permaculture are good bets to persue. The hippie movement should not revolve around drugs (drugs should not be illegal but should also be understood and used responsibly), it also should not concentrate around free love. The only feasible victory can only come from creating a feasible strategy for a sustainable society based on personal freedom (reminder enforcing a certain hippie "way" is not personal freedom to others).

What happens if we dont all wanna live on the streets protesting or living day to day? Exactly...the only way is to get smart, buy up land and literally create a system within a system, a good alternative to capitalist ways. You gotta first find a way to eat, sleep and have a handle on a tomorrow before scraping everything and starting fresh. I dont know , just my thoughts on this

shameless_heifer · Apr 22, 2008

Tamerlane said:

So renew the hippie movement. When you succeed, come to me and I will bow down before you. "How to be a hippie movement revivalist" ? The term sounds tacky and plastic, prepackaged hipness you can buy by following some sort of guidelines. Hippies didn't come about as a result of some concious decision by a group of likeminded people to change the world. They were just a bunch of people in history, doing their own thing, something that, having now passed, will never come back in its previous splendor and grandiosity.
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How can we come back if we never left. No one wants you to bow to anyone, not hippie to bow down, we stand with our head up. We did do a lot of LSD and we did change the world.. computers changed the world.. Bill Gates was a hippie. We also (yawn) freed the slaves from the machine. This has been said over n over till it's formed a groove.. by doing our own thing we changed the world. That was what the whole thing was about.. the freedom to live as you pleased as long as it harmed none. After 40 yrs ppl STILL do not know what hippie is. Is it that you just refuse to see or are you blinded by the non hippies that talk shit in here.

sh

HauntedGraffiti · Apr 22, 2008

im not wasting my time reading these bullshit long posts
if you want to do something, get off the computer and go out there and make a difference

rainbowedskylover · Apr 23, 2008

period

rainbowedskylover · Apr 23, 2008

The_Moroccan_Raccoon said:

I like what you're saying, and I do agree it needs to be revived.

But I think it's a little shallow to try and bring back that style as opposed to facing the issues we have now. The issues may be the same, but as great as the '60s may have been, it was ultimately unsuccessful.

Most of the hippies were not radical activists. Most of them did not genuinely practice some kind of Eastern philosophy. The hippie movement crashed and could not sustain itself for a reason. It's a paradox: if there was no direction, it couldn't last, and if there was a clear direction, it would remove the "freak" individualist ideology and defeat the purpose of the movement entirely.

Timothy Leary was no leader. Neither was Ken Kesey. The Grateful Dead could not carry that torch because of their own self-indulgent lifestyle that ultimately killed them.

However, I love their music at least as much as any hippie. I listen to every live recording I can find. I've got long hair and I'm proud that I can wear a tyedye shirt and people will tell me I look like Jerry Garcia. I love hearing the all the stories from former Deadheads. Some of them have jobs and have joined mainstream society again. Some of them are drug addicted and don't have the mental capacity to have a job and support their families. I play music with them and I love all those people. But I know that I can't revive the movement beyond those ecstatic jams and the mystical acid trips.

First of all, let's take a look at a great hippie who did make it.

Allen Ginsberg is a great example, and my personal favourite.
From the very beginning, he studied literature and was a brilliant academic that way. He went back and saw that William Blake and Walt Whitman were expressing something similar to himself and were true hippies in their own times. Ginsberg also became involved in political philosophy, as a strong leftist. This is no surprise, as his father was a poet and a teacher and his mother was a radical Communist.

We've read about him with the Beats, through his own writing and through Kerouac's. He contributed a sexual liberation as well. But throughout that time and afterwards, he was seriously studying Buddhist philosophy, as well as many different traditions of literature. Kerouac did too, more by learning from others, notably Gary Snyder (another hippie to check out...) But Kerouac's drinking killed him. Ginsberg went on with his writing and studies, both academic and spiritual, and then founded a college based on a combination of these teachings (The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics). He took acid and went to Dead shows, but was never self-indulgent in the same way so many others were. He died 10 years ago or something, but he left an enormous body of work.

"Howl for Carl Solomon" though written long before the summer of love era, really does show (what would develop) into the hippie movement in a less glorified light... "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness..."

If there's one person I respect the most, it would have to be Allen Ginsberg. Maybe it's because I see a hundred different parallels between him and me... but he kept the hippie movement alive from long before it emerged until long after. He embodied the movement in every way...artistically, spiritually, sexually, politically...

My point is, if we compare him to Jerry Garcia for example, which man should people of my generation be looking to for our path to reviving the movement. Arguably, Garcia was the major cultural icon of the movement, but Ginsberg sustained the spirit of it. For that matter, he helped people to look as far back as Blake to find the roots of the movement.

To be a hippie movement revivalist, there's no way we can give everybody acid and go to Phish concerts and think that it could be revived.

What we've really got is a generation looking for something and becoming completely lost.

No, you can't make everyone recycle and you can't make adults listen by telling them off. But you can read and pass the ideas along to your friends. If you hate the government, read Marx and think. If you hate the media, read Marshall McLuhan. If you hate your parent's religion, go study Buddhism or read Sartre. These are just examples. Go learn whatever it is you want to learn.

If we want to revive the movement with any kind of depth, what we really need is thought, discussion and philosophy. Coloured shirts, trippy music and pot are a lot of fun, but we all need to accept that if the movement comes back, it won't look, sound, feel or trip the same as before.

Don't think I'm saying I'm superior to anyone or anything because I know very well that I'm 17 and don't know any more than most of you. I'm just trying to learn every way I can.
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dude, i think ur way beyond what many young people do to revive the hippie movement. if you really want to mean something to the progressive movement, you better go educate yourself. if you don't like something, go looking for an alternative. i think that that's basically it what ur saying.
it ain't enough to keep on shouting people should be more nice to each other. and your not gonna get there with music and drugs indeed. they can be incredibly inspiring, they still do today, but if you want to make this world a littlebit better you need to be sober and willing to work.

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How to be a hippie movement revivalist.

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