Hippies why im the original

More far-reaching than liquor, quicker for insights than college or psychiatry, the pure and instant magic of LSD appeared for an interesting moment to capture the mind of the hippies. Everybody loved a panacea. They therefore attached to the mystique of LSD the conviction that by opening their minds to chemical visions they were gaining insights from which society soon should profit. Hippies themselves might have profited, as anyone might, from LSD in a clinical environment, but the direction of their confidence lay elsewhere, and they placed themselves beneath the supervision mainly of other hippies.

Dialogue was confined among themselves, no light was shed upon the meaning of their visions, and their preoccupation became LSD itself—what it did to them last time, and what it might do next. Tool had become symbol, and symbol principle. If the hippie ideal of community failed, it would fail upon lines of a dull, familiar scheme: the means had become the end.

Visions of community seen under LSD had not been imparted to anyone, remaining visible only to hippies, or entering the visual scene only in the form of commentary upon LSD itself, jokes and claims for its efficacy growing shriller with the increase of dependence.

Under the influence of LSD hippies had written things down, or drawn pictures, but upon examination the writings or the pictures proved less perfect than they had appeared while the trip was on. Great utterances delivered under LSD were somehow unutterable otherwise. Great thoughts the hippies had thought under LSD they could never soberly convey, nor reproduce the startling new designs for happier social arrangements.

Two years after the clear beginnings of the hippies in San Francisco, a date established by the opening of the Psychedelic Shop, hippies and others had begun to recognize that LSD, if it had not failed, had surely not fully succeeded.

It had turned them on, then off. Their paranoia was the paranoia of all youthful heretics. Even Paranoids Have Real Enemies. But they saw all the world as straight but them; all cops were brutes, and everyone else was an arm of the cops. Disaffiliating with all persons and all institutions but themselves, they disaffiliated with all possible foundations of community. That segment of the Establishment known as the Haight-Ashbury, having welcomed the hippies with friendliness and hope, had listened with more courtesy to hippies than hippies had listened to the Haight-Ashbury.

Hippies had theories of community, theories of work, theories of child care, theories of creativity. Creative hippies were extremely creative about things the city and the district could do for them. For example, the city could cease harassing hippies who picked flowers in Golden Gate Park to give them away on Haight Street.

The city replied that the flowers of Golden Gate Park were for all people—were community flowers—and suggested that hippies plant flowers of their own. Their illusions, their unreason, their devil theories, their inexperience of life, and their failures of perception had begun to persuade even the more sympathetic elements of the Haight-Ashbury that the hippies perhaps failed of perception in general.

The failure of the hippies to communicate reasonably cast doubt upon their reliability as observers, especially with respect to the most abrasive of all issues, their relationship with the police. Was it merely proof of its basic old rigidity that the Haight-Ashbury believed that community implied social relief, that visions implied translation to social action? So read an answering campaign pin as friction increased. But the hippies, declining self-regulation, aloof, self-absorbed, dumped mountains of garbage on the Panhandle.

The venereal rate of the Haight-Ashbury multiplied by six. The hippies accused Dr. Ellis Sox of the health department of sexual repression. The danger grew alarmingly of rats, food poisoning, hepatitis, pulmonary tuberculosis, and of meningitis caused by overcrowded housing.

Hippies behaved so much like visitors to the community that their neighbors, who intended to live in the district forever, questioned whether proclamations of community did not require, acts of community.

Hippies had theories of love, which might have meant, at the simplest level, muting music for the benefit of neighbors who must rise in the morning for work. Would the Haight-Ashbury once again, if the emergency arose, expend years of its life to retain a Panhandle for hippies to dump their garbage on? Or would it abandon the hippies to the most primitive interpretations of law, permit their dispersion, and see their experiment end without beginning?

With the passage of the civil rights movement from demonstrations to legal implementation excellent opportunities existed for the show of love. What grand new design in black and white had hippies seen under LSD? If Negroes were expected to share with hippies the gestures of love, then hippies ought to have shared with Negroes visions of equal rights. The burdens of the Negroes of the district were real. One afternoon, on Masonic Street, a hundred feet off Haight, I saw a Negro boy, perhaps twelve years old, repairing an old bicycle that had been repaired before.

His tools lay on the sidewalk beside him, arranged in a systematic way, as if according to an order he had learned from his father. His face was intent, the work was complicated. Nearby, the hippies masqueraded. I mentioned to a lady the small boy at work, the big boys at play.

A hippie record is entitled Notes From Underground. He had not yet heard of Dostoevsky, whose title the record borrowed, or of the antislavery underground in America, or of the World War II underground in France.

Nobody asked the hippies to accept or acknowledge the texts of the past. Betrayed by science and reason, hippies indulged earnestly in the occult, the astrological, the mystical, the horoscopic, and the Ouija. Did hippies know that Ouija boards were a popular fad not long ago? Or did they know that The Prophet of Kahlil Gibran, reprinted seventy-seven times since , lies well within the tradition of American self-help subliterature? Inevitably, they were going through all these things twice, unaware of things gone through before.

Inherent in everything printed or hanging in the visual scene on Haight Street was satirical rejection of cultural platitudes, but in the very form and style, of the platitudes themselves. Children of television, they parodied it, spoofing Batman, as if Batman mattered.

Of all the ways in which hippies began to polarize toward work their withdrawal from the visual scene was most astute. They had begun to learn, after flight, rebellion, and the pleasures of satirizing things they hoped they could reject, that work requires solitude and privacy, and that to work well means to resist the shaping influence of the media, abandoning the visual scene to those whom it gratifies.

The ideal of work—not simply jobs, but meaningful work, work as service—had been a hippie ideal from the outset. The apprehension of quiet, positive acts as meaningful, requiring time and liaison , was a more difficult act than parading the streets in costume. The act of extending community beyond oneself, beyond other hippies, beyond the comfort of drugs to the wider community of diverse color and class was nearer than hippies had thought to the unity of self and nature.

At the start, it was frightening to undertake. Finally, it was instructive and exalting. Self-regulation was more satisfying than regulation by the police, and conformity to enduring objectives more liberating finally than chemical visions.

If such acts were this side millennium, they were nevertheless gestures of community reflecting an emergence of the hippies from the isolation of their first two years in San Francisco. Acquaintance with the straight community increased as work and work projects proliferated. Acquaintance produced degrees of trust and accurate identity.

Generalizations failed. Not all straights were pure straight, even as hippies differed one from another. The life of the hippie community began to reveal a history of its own. It had evolved through flight, drugs, and conflict, and back into the straight world, which it now knew in a manner different from before.

To direct the Hip Job Co-op, the Free Store, public feedings in the Panhandle, to produce even one memorable edition of the Oracle Volume I, Number 7, preserving the essence of hippie theory in debate among Ginsberg, Leary, Snyder, and Watts required a pooling of skills, resources, and confrontation with the straight community.

It meant, even, coming face to face with the telephone company, and it meant, as well, the ironic recognition that necessary work invited imitation of the very processes hippies had formerly despised.

To purchase houses to shelter hippies, food to feed them, required compromise with the community, a show of dependable intentions. At some moments the process of learning was almost visible. None of his listeners betrayed alarm—some feared that his words were too true. Hippies were scarcely the first to discover hyprocrisy. All America knows is profit and property.

It, too, had fought its battles with authority, and he saw it now in its diversity, rather than as monolith. At such moments of meeting hippies knew sensations of reconciliation and escape from their own isolation. They learned, as American minorities before them had learned, that nothing was more instructive about human life than to have been a minority group, and to have emerged.

Acquaintance clarified: straights had not so much opposed drugs or dirt as their inefficiency; runaway children broke real hearts; plagues of rats, by the agreement of mankind, were unaesthetic; straights, too, resisted work, yearned for varieties of love, and found the balance. Frank Kavanaugh, teacher at a Catholic high school, resident of the Haight-Ashbury for fourteen years, summarized the positive aspects of polarization in a public statement widely applauded. He wrote in part:.

The hippies had come for help. The freedom of cities had always attracted a significant segment of every generation seeking to resolve American dilemmas unrestrained by commitments to family obligations in home communities.

New York and Chicago had always known waves of hippies fleeing Winesburg, Ohio. In San Francisco, as hippies engaged in public dialogue, they forced the city to examine and modify standing practices. Laws governing marijuana became exposed for their paradoxes. Accurate information on drugs became an objective. Police methods were reviewed. They are not some horde of invading foreigners. They are our children, yours and mine, exercising their right to move freely about a country which will soon be very much their own.

You for your part are not some select group of medieval chieftains who can, at will, close up your town and withdraw behind the walls of your own closed society. The City of St. Francis deserves better from you. The issue is whether you can by fiat declare a minority unwelcome in our community. If you declare against these young people today, what minority is going to bear the brunt of your discrimination tomorrow? Miraculously, they retained it in a community and in a world whose easiest tendency was guns.

For that virtue, if for no other, they valuably challenged American life. If they did not oppose the war in Vietnam in the way of organized groups, they opposed it by the argument of example, avoiding violence under all circumstances.

They owned no guns. By contrast, the manner in which the major Establishment of San Francisco approached the hippies chillingly suggested the basis of American failure abroad: never questioning its own values, lacking the instinct for difficult dialogue, it sought to suppress by exclusion; exclusion failing, it was prepared to call the police.

The trouble on the visual scene was drugs, and drugs brought cops; the trouble was runaway children some as young as ten years old lost among hippies, and runaway children brought cops; dirty books brought cops.

The trouble was hazardous housing, which brought the health department, and in the wake of the health department, cops. The trouble with the police, from the point of view of the hippies, was false arrest, illegal arrest, incitement to arrest, cops with swinging clubs, obscene cops diseased by racial hatred, and the tendency of any appearance by police to stimulate excitement where none had been. They accused cops of accepting bribes from drug peddlers and then arresting users, and they singled out a few officers whose zeal for the enforcement of standard morality exceeded reason.

The cop was the enemy visible in a marked car, whom hippies viewed as the living symbol of all the vice and hypocrisy of the Establishment. The San Francisco cop had never lived in Haight-Ashbury. Now, by and large, he lived in the Richmond, the Sunset, or within the thirty-mile suburban radius established by law, in a house with a patch of grass and a garage with an oil-proof floor he might live long enough to pay for. He read his Hearst newspaper and watched television, and went to church and Candlestick Park.

He hated the sound of sirens: his occupational hazard was heart failure at an early age from too many surges of adrenalin. The first significant confrontation of the decade between police and the new antagonist occurred on Friday, May 13, , in the rotunda of city hall, where several hundred persons had gathered to attend, in a spirit of protest, a hearing of a House Committee on Un-American Activities.

Denied admission to the hearing room, the crowd sang, chanted, and appeared to represent potential violence. Four hundred policemen, a contingent larger than the gathering itself, dispersed the crowd with clubs and fire hoses, jailed more than fifty persons, brought one to trial a Berkeley student —and failed to convict him. In the years which followed, all issues were to be repeatedly merged with the issue of police action: the cop himself became an issue.

The San Francisco Police Department, between and , undertook liberal reforms never dramatic enough to please its critics. It was the servant of the city. Every adult was allocated a job, from gardener to candle-maker, and everything we did was clearly rooted in a belief system, so our childhood felt structured and calm in many ways.

We were both busy and free, dipping in and out of all the workshops: cheese-making, carpet-weaving, woodwork. Sarah was conscious from a young age that they were different from other children. Meanwhile, we lived in caravans, or in rooms within shared houses. But despite the desperate childish desire to fit in, I knew it was amazing and beautiful, even while we were living it. How do they feel about the rise of the neo-hippy? I am loth to cash in on it; that feels like the antithesis of everything our childhood instilled in me.

Old hippies believed in living economically and communally, bulk-buying wholefoods and sharing the childcare; Nell says that if your bag of lentils fits into your hand, then you are definitely not a hippy. She was accused of being insensitive for leaving a non-vegan chocolate cake, a gift from her year-old grandmother, out in the kitchen.

They share resources with their neighbours and are open-minded and welcoming. For many people, being a hippy has become more a badge of honour than a way of life. But perhaps I am falling victim to rose-tinted nostalgia for a hippiedom that never was. Perhaps there never was a golden age. This is a massive generalisation, but how many hippies were there in Rotherham in ? My guess is, not many. Whereas in Cambridge, Oxford, a lot of people would probably have identified themselves as hippies.

We were anti-materialistic and very much seeking out eastern philosophy and ideas. I had been disappointed by my philosophy course at university — it was all very dry and logic-based. We took too many drugs, listened to lots of amazing music and hung out — people from so many different places: Australians, Europeans from all over, Canadians, Americans, including quite a few US draft dodgers.

It was a precursor to the whole gap year thing. Sandbrook argues that it was an inherently elitist movement. A lot of people had no central heating. Dropping out involved a level of sacrifice lower than it might today. Many of the younger generation now drawn to it live in stressful urban environments and work in demanding jobs. This was precisely the reason my womb guru Chloe Isidora found shamanism: because she was burned out and unhappy.

They are a diverse bunch — four white women, four women of colour, all from different walks of life, and all friendly and keen to find a greater connection to their own bodies.

Despite the scars of her hippy upbringing, Nell agrees. I think the children of hippies will always struggle to fully embrace the revival, perhaps because so many of us have rebelled in the only way we know how: by becoming desperately conventional.

We walk among you, but we are in disguise. But they are wearing clean, smart clothes they bought from a shop, getting married before they have a baby, and buying a house — people whose parents believed all property is theft.

And conventional though I may be, I confess I enjoyed the womb wisdom circle. I liked Isidora, and when she gave me a little bundle of sage to purify my house, it brought back fond memories.

In a weird kind of way, it felt like coming home.