Don't get me wrong

I don't want anybody to get the wrong idea about yesterday's rant about hippies. My descriptions and experience do not come from bearing witness to the late 60's so I wish no ill will towards my elders. My experience and sour grapes comes from my generation X experience of a neo-yuppie hippie movement that occurred in the late 80's through mid 90's when young people started somewhat of a hippie revival. People wore tie dyed shirts, 100 dollar sandals, beads, long skirts with jingly-jangly's on them and spent their summers going to music festivals and paying 4$ for bottled water. Kid's followed the Dead before Jerry Garcia's passing and then they moved on to Phish. Before Jerry died, I used to get front row seats for Phish on the same day of the show. They even played a theater on my college campus. My rant kind of stems from the commercialization of the hippie movement. Woodstock 94 and 99. Generation X thought it was cool and merchandisers, advertisers, promoters and manufacturers had found a way to get a piece of the baby boomers hard earned money through their Gen X children. But there was something lost in the translation. Gone were the "sit ins", "love ins", protest marches and the like. It seems as if the historical aspects were forgotten: sexual liberation, women's liberation, equality of the races, pro war vs. anti war, the cold war and the "communist threat". I guess that my point is that Generation X has been living the high life and need to be reminded, from a historical perspective, that there was more to it than hippie clothes and concerts.

Hippies

Tonight at dinner Cindy and I started discussing the fact that her father used to work on a Swiss freighter in the late 60's and that he once was docked in San Fransisco for a break. This lead us to start on the topic of Pee-chooly oil and hippies. Now the first part of our discussion revolved around the disgusting scent emitted by this foul concoction. Especially when mixed with the stench of an unshowered human body that's been following around some band on the aforementioned person's parents' dime. (as was the case in the late 80's and early 90's) A fair haired college girl with dreadlocks is not Rasta, is not cool, is not av ante garde. It's just plain dirty. And as for the "hippie" movement of the 60's? Well, we commonly see these people in our society today. They are unclean, unshaven, dressed in tattered garb and usually under the influence of some mind altering substance. Yes, they are called Bums. Or homeless people. We don't call them hippies anymore. And if they are lucky, they live in a van down by the river. Just like that "hippie" friend of yours that was always trying to get enough gas money and weed together to make it to the next Dead show.