Craig and All of the Other Hippies Were Right!

I made it thru about 1 paragraph of that crap.

Freaky. I would call that a journalistic hallucination.

The poor and middle class aren't very green - if coincidence permits, they'll buy or use a 'green' product, if it is cheaper.

"Organic" foods, Solar PV, Nature Conservancy land holds, electric cars, etc are all trappings and subsidies of the rich, the near-rich (or, if you dig deep enough, their dropped out kids). One of the best examples, an ignorant, hysterical green movement knocked us off of nuclear power and onto a far crappier alternative, bit. coal, which is a true, global, environmental debacle.

"You know, all that typical hippie crap no one believes in anymore. Right?" Right.

Well, one thing for certain, we can surely say that the conservatives and the right rediscovered preemptive war and the militarization of America......then again, that's pretty much the same old crap that has been spoon-fed to scared populaces over the centuries.

From the perspective of one who has been there, that article is at least somewhat accurate. Myself and my friends were reading Mother Earth News when we were 15 years old (1968) and thinking about someday living on a couple acres with a wood stove and perhaps solar or water power and a garden. My first job was as a dishwasher in a Macrobiotic (healthy) restaurant, where I did much more than wash dishes....I learned about REAL food at the time when most people were celebrating processed quick and canned junk. We started making yogurt when I was 18.

In an attempt to fulfill the Mother Earth dream, we then moved out to the boonies in WV and TN, and lived on the equiv of about $1.00 a day for three years or so - now that's a light footprint! During that period, I worked on the invention or at least a renewed popularity of soy foods, including milk, ice cream, yogurt and more. Many of my friends from the old hippie days in the country went onto great things, including the founding of the first online communities as well as much of the software and hardware that underlies this stuff (specially, The Well in the Bay Area, etc.)

The same folks are virtually 100% responsible for the rebirth of natural childbirth, having done the science, training and evangelicalism needed to promote this. As a strange point of fact, much of this movement was born out of an anti-choice stance (a stance that the right has now claimed ). At the time, the local midwives offered "Don't get an choice - come here and we will deliver your baby for free, and we will take care of it if you don't want it".....now that is radical.

The story could go on and on, but the point is not to claim this moral high ground, it is rather to set the record straight. There are LOTS of bad folks on the left and lots of bad folks on the right - there are creative folks of all persuasions....although arguably, a liberal point of view does allow a more open mind. In the longer scope of history, the hippies appear to be an utter failure - but that really only happened because hippies sold out and also because such a movement was difficult to "mainstream" into America at the time (and probably still today).

As with any movement, a lot of mistakes were made. However, the basic ideas were sound and are still valid and do have a place in the modern green movement, namely:
1. Healthy eating - what you eat is what you are.
2. A basis of life in community - "It takes a village", etc. - we can see the truth of this statement in the VA. Tech thing.....his "village" failed to either accept or see him for what he was.
3. Renewable energy
4. The Environmental movement - arguable reborn on Earth Day in 1970....

In terms of the rich and poor, yes it is somewhat true that the hippies were largely a bunch of spoiled rich kids who therefore had the time and energy to "do their own thing". But we didn't choose to be born into middle or upper class families. That just happened to be the case, and therefore we did have more options. I would argue that many movements start out this way and then the technology filters down to the rest of the populace.

All this stuff will take generations to sort out, however that does not negate giving credit where it is due. Each of us has ALL of these points of view (conservative, liberal, etc.) within us, and part of our free will and intelligence is sorting out where each one applies. My guess is that conservatives designed better airplanes and even cars while we hippies were working with soy yogurt. Some greasers probably came up with fuel injection, while we were trying to coax more spinach out the ground, and other conservatives probably built some great pollution scrubbers while Ben and Jerry were getting fat and happy on sugary ice cream.

So there is enough credit to go around - but do keep the counter culture in mind with many of the modern movements.

One thing in that article jumped out at me: The writer made a big deal about 'natural, chemical free' cleaning products available at target.

that is pure BULL.

any product that can pull grease off of a pan can do the same to the human body.
I don't care if that chemical was produced from a bucket of crude oil or an orange - they are equally safe / dangerous.

Cyanide is 100% natural (there's some in apple seeds - eat a handfull and your tongue will go numb.). doesn't make it safe.

I really don't think it's a left-right thing. The issues became politicized and stands were and are taken, almost regardless of merit. The young 'liberal' will be more experimental and by nature the majority of those experiments will fail.

Chris, Speaking in (dangerous) generalizations, it's very easy to argue that suburban life created the reactionary hippie. Your healthy eating, traditional family support and community life and a sense of nature and personal conservation were radically altered or destroyed by suburbia, along with all those farms. Small town families never lost, or were not very far from the plain, simple life. Perhaps it explains the red/blue split.

If baby-boomers, or former hippies (or whatever term) are looking to write their legacy, that isn't the article. Citing Ben & Jerry's as a business revolution is pathetic. Ice cream.


(PS- surprised there was no rise for dropping the n-word... thought that might stir it up. )

In some ways, the 60's is occurring again today - what happened was a disconnect between what the young people wanted out of life, and what they see as the direction of their country and their elders.

The country is at a crossroads today of whether we are going to act (as a society) to tame our energy use for the numerous reasons it MUST be done (pollution, CO2, limited fossil fuels, etc.)......or, are we going to use our military might to continue to secure energy supplies to feed our excessive habits. In many ways, it ends up being one or the other. We can spend $$$ here developing a renewable energy industry and a conservation economy, or we can spend the money on more failed overseas adventures.

Although promoting Sugar and Cream as an example of the Movement is a bit weak, we do have to give some credit where due - Ben and Jerry did start a new wave of corporate responsibility in many ways - giving back to the community, supporting local farmers both here and abroad (Rain Forest Crunch, etc.), paying workers well while not making the executive pay 100x higher (as other companies have).

As mentioned here before, a couple more fitting examples of hippie influence are Vermont Castings, Apple Computer, Zomeworks (solar tracking, etc) and similar companies.

Back in the day, I know many of us sat back and contemplated our footprint on the earth. Seeing the world as one. We were young idealist and did a lot of contemplating back in de daze. We tried to live by our beliefs, as Craig said many of us city hippies went back to the land, chopped wood and carried water. Living simply does wonders for the soul, and the lessons that we learned molded who we are today. The essence of the article has merit. Polarization is not in the Hippie handbook. I strongly believe that as a nation we can't be strong if we are divided.
The hippie mantra, enjoy
"Love is but the song we sing,
And fear's the way we die...
C'mon people now,
Smile on your brother
Ev'rybody get together
Try and love one another right now

Our fathers survived the depression and a crushed economy, won a horrific, total 2 theatre-war, came home basically rebuilt the economy and nearly every company in the S&P to global leadership. I have trouble comparing Ipods and ice cream to that record. (The do make a good HBR case study, though.)

We are in transition. IMO, there is just a lot of flap and cluck and no real plan from either side of the political spectrum.

Energy drives the economy and so, foreign policy. There are only a couple of options to handle the majority of our energy requirements: coal, oil, gas and nuke. (Solar, corn ethanol, new hydro and wind can only handle single digit percentage of power requirements and will need more time to develop.)

Coal makes up 54% (and growing) of our electricity production, so it appears that we're headed that way from oil. No one wants more oil dependency, or gas, for that matter and nukes, though technically sound are politically dead. (Imagine though, how our foreign policy would look today if we had France's 80% nuke elec. production with only the rest made up by our own coal and hydro? Imagine the emphasis on electric, non-polluting heating and cars then?)

If we can't stomach nukes, then we have to clean up the coal burners. Nothing else can come close to supplying more than 20% of our energy requirements within 20 years.

I haven't heard of any strategic national energy policy that states any of these realities from anyone. Instead, we get the posturing of "An Inconvenient Village" from the left and economic force pushing toward the sloppy use of oil and coal by industry on the right. Economic force wins.

So, where's the plan? That's an opportunity to leave a legacy that's more significant than the Ipod.

Charlie Z said:

Our fathers survived the depression and a crushed economy, won a horrific, total 2 theatre-war, came home basically rebuilt the economy and nearly every company in the S&P to global leadership. I have trouble comparing Ipods and ice cream to that record. (The do make a good HBR case study, though.)

Click to expand...

Comparing one generation to another is a tough thing to do. For instance, the Korean conflict was somewhat known in this country as the prelude to Vietnam with many draft dodgers, including those who acted gay at the recruiters (watch MASH - those characters did not come from nowhere)..... my dad tells me that MANY of his peers did everything in their power not to go......so painting with a broad brush is tough.

Although ipods and ice cream may make a good talking point, the truth is that the personal computer (apple), the internet and social and corporate responsibility are major historical milestones. So is the environmental movement, organic food and the like. I would argue that these have worldwide impact which will be continue for centuries.

That does not, as WebWidow touches on, negate the positives of others...either now, or way back when. The fact is that many of the great developers of our resources and industries had little inkling of the harm they were doing....while they may have known they were polluting the river, they didn't know they were doing so to the whole ocean and ecosystem. Ignorance is a valid excuse when the science did not yet exist.

The point, if there is any, is that we should not summarily dismiss a generation or movement, but rather take the good and dispose of the bad. As to the current Green and Environmental movement, much of the foundation was laid by those longhairs. Of course, the irony is that when longhairs moved to the country, they found that all the farmers and hollow dwellers were already burning wood and conserving everything!

And so the world turns. We could go back further and see Thoreau and even Henry Ford (soy,etc.) as fathers of the movement.