- michael jordan May 14th, 2007 12:14 pm replies
We stopped the Viet Nam War, that was a GREAT Accomplishment that no redneck starch head can take away from us.
Now we have another few wars to stop started by the same bunch who started the other one. Why not put an end to that same bunch so we can get back to smiling again?
- artistannie May 14th, 2007 1:00 pm comments
The times have changed but for many of us the core values have remained the same. It wasn’t about long hair, free-sex and drugs - it was about finding ways to live peacefully and humanely on the earth.
- PJW May 14th, 2007 2:30 pm comments:
The Hippies contributed much to the cultural shifts of the 1960s and 1970s, and have at times been unfairly scapegoated by critics on the right and on the left.
Still, if we look back at the hostility felt toward Hippies by many in the Black civil rights movements, by many Chicano and Native American activists in New Mexico, and by many within the feminist movement, we might come to a more balanced sense of the “movement’s” strengths and limitations.
Clearly, the counterculture’s critique of conformity, consumerism, and militarism is important. Yet none of these problems have abated. They may be worse. And let’s be clear: the anti-war movement was not the Hippie movement; they were two distinct if overlapping things.
This is not to say the Hippies were inauthentic but to point out that the dominant culture only accepted the part of the message from the counterculture that did not threaten the dominant stuctures of power.
I’m left wondering if any movement based on the individual can ever achieve lasting structural change.
- michael jordan May 14th, 2007 4:08 pm
PJW: You said “And let’s be clear: the anti-war movement was not the Hippie movement; they were two distinct if overlapping things.”
In what vein do you make this assertion? Is it through hindsight, or some historical account which attempts to bifurcate the movement into acceptable bites of history? When you cite the Black Civil Rights movement, Cezar Chavez, Russell Means, Angela Davis, and Gloria Steinem and when you consider the makeup of the Chicago Seven how can you say that all of us who were marching with them in Chicago and Miami were not passing around the same joints taking the same acid and getting hit by the same billy-clubs? Are you unwittingly making an assumption that Hippies are White? Do you know who Jimi Hendrix was. People who were really making sacrifices and mobilizing the timid to step outside of their comfortable cocoons were definitely taking drugs, and marching in the streets and writing polemics, and editing newspapers like the Berkeley Barb’s editor and owner Dr. Alan Coult who wrote for the American Anthropological Association on the new still legal discipline of Psychedelic Anthropology, lectured to thousands in Berkeley and provided direction to the entire People’s Park Movement through the pages of his newspaper. Do you think that Country Joe McDonald never smoked dope and took acid? Do you think that he was stone cold sober when he led the “Fish Cheer”?
Consider:
Bobby Seale: “From the Sixties…to the Future!,” is about “getting to the future via the whole synthesis of the quantum, computer and DNA molecular revolutions, and within the cyberspace non-linear range.”
Jerry Rubin: attempted to merge political and lifestyle liberation under the Yippie banner
Abbie Hoffman: described himself as “an orphan of America” and “a child of Woodstock Nation.”
Rennie Davis:lecturer on meditation and self-awareness. A recent Davis workshop was entitled “Room Without Veils.” The workshop promised to “unlock a unique toolbox” that would “allow connection to your own organic intelligence.” Topics covered in the workshop included “Navigating Armageddon,” “Understanding Your Energy Signature,” and “Unlocking Your Innocence.”
Lee Weiner: He spent most of his trial hours reading science fiction paperbacks or books on eastern philosophy;
I read this as a confirmation of applied Hippie philosophy made possible by the use of psychedelics.
The women’s movement in the US started at the ‘fin de siecle’, the American Indian Movement started in 1492, the Black civil rights movement started in 1619. It is an insult to these people to assume that they were not participants in consciousness raising activities of psychedelic drug use. All that it took to take Acid was nerve and once you took it it changed your life forever, and there is/was no turning back. These people did not lack nerve. There is a need to distinguish speed, heroin, and cocaine from the sacraments of peyote, and the LSD of Albert Hoffmann, Leary, Alpert, Kesey, and even Tom Wolfe. There was so much revisionist history during those times that the reality of the situation gets lost. If not for the transcendent insights afforded to people who were brave enough to drop these drugs we would still be in Viet Nam today.
The status quo is still worried that it will happen again so the disinformation campaign continues. The only reason people are not doing these quality psychedelics in greater numbers today is because there are more police, stiffer penalties, they keep building more jails, they listen to more private conversations, tap more phones, and have more and more bizarre weapons and tortures because they don’t want anybody thinking freely.
Stay Radical, Keep Thinking, don’t give up and don’t swallow their media lines.
Sunday, May 27, 2007
The Hippies were right
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I like your comments about these people not being of this earth. I remember Jim Morrison’s song:
What have they done to the earth
What have they done to our fair sister
Ravaged and plundered and ripped her and bit her
Stuck her with knives in the side of the dawn and
Tied her with fences and dragged her down
I hear a very gentle sound
With your ear down to the ground
WE WANT THE WORLD AND WE WANT IT NOW
This pack has taken over the world for their own destructive ends. It reminds me of Marlon Brando’s character in Apocolypse Now. He was completely mad from so much war and misery. This is a glimpse into the souls of the war-mongers and the elites who support them. It’s a scary glimpse. Imagine a world run by people like him.
michael jordan:
You namedropper you!Ha!Had to add the “ha” as my jokes have been misinterperted on this site before.Wanted to add a brief personal history.Nothing as star-studded as your story but perhaps informative anyway.
I was a student at the UW-Madison from 1965-1970-a Political Science major.I was a vet with one child. In spite of being classmates with the most “radical” elements on campus-my first vote for Prez. was Goldwater and my 68 vote was too embarassing to mention on this site. What changed me as my health failed over the years was the knowledge that there are major differences among politicians and parties. Also-Progressives should always keep in mind that some wealthy people are needed for changes to be made {short of a bloodpath}. Thus-please don’t quibble with people like The Nation’s publisher over small differences in philosophy.Gratitude can be effective and shouldn’t be confused with kowtowing.
Others mentioned the use of undercover agents to sabotage movements.Those here in Madison faced a particularly virulent form of that in the Cointelpro.
Regardin drug usage- of course weed was demonized by the warmongers-you can’t mold killing machines out of young dopers.The opposition of the pharmaceutical companies and drug cartels to the legalization of this benign drug is a scandal of about 80 years duration. Just noticed the lack of a g in regarding above. That’s appropriate as Madison’s offering to the 08 Prez. race-Toxic Tommy Thompson” always drops his g’s. Talk about a schizophrenic political climate- we have The Progressive Magazine- Freedom From Religion Society-John Nichols & Tommy Thompson.
Were it not for the prohibitive price of-and punishment for using-weed I’d be celebrating this thread by lighting a very large doobie.But at age 65 I won’t risk a term in our ever-expanding jail.