One great thing about being part of the sixties generation, the flower power hippies, the anti-war, anti-nuke, anti-establishment, free love, turn on, tune in, and rock out, Janis Joplin, Jimmi Hendricks, Jefferson Airplane mob scene was just that. We were a force. We stood together. We were a tribe which could answer the call from wherever we were to come together for fun or for protest, anytime, anywhere. The uprisings were often stronger than our individual plans.
When the anti-war protests hit one of their peaks at the beginning of 1970 we shut down college campuses all over the country. We sacrificed willingly our tuition, our plan, for a cause that was bigger than we were. It was a crazy ride. There was a lot of righteousness. We collectively wanted natural childbirth, natural fabrics, healthy food, no more napalm, no more nukes, no more Betty Crocker cake mixes, no more war, no more stupid text books that said we were the only democracy in the world, we wanted to bust apart the companies like AT&T and United Fruit Company, we hated Monsanto, we loved Adelle Davis, The Moosewood Cookbook, The Tassahara Bread Book, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, we 'got' the oldies like the Beat Poets, we supported the Cuban Revolution, we we we we we we....
That "we" was what gave us power. That "we" was what made us different. We were trying our damnedest to be wildly individualistic. Our hippie clothes, our music, our antiheroes and heroes reflected this. But the more we tried to stake out our individualism, the more perfectly we fit into the "we".
Our parent's 'we' was created by the Great Depression and World War 11. We thought, felt, that the ties that bound us came from our expanded consciousnesses (great drugs, eastern religions, meditation, yoga, rolfing, feldenchrist method, anthroposophy) our heightened consciousness. We knew we were on the right side and in retrospect, we often were. We wanted feminism, we hated apartheid whether in our country or South Africa. We we we we we.
My young friend's view is that my miraculous mob, compatriots, peeps, are/were the most self centered, over-consuming, ruin-the-world for those who follow generation ever. I am kind of devastated by this view. This is partly because we had soooooooooooooo much fun. It had to be good. And we were trying to save the world. And we were a newborn tribe. That has to be good. The idea that we not only failed miserably, but turned into the enemy hurts.
It could be right. The once most radical, now ex-hippie people I know talk about their iphones and imacs and ibooks as if they were as wonderful as the Dalai Lama. We once hated identifying with brands. Many, many, many of the old hippies buy their second house and their third car with earnings from stocks in the companies we most despised: the war companies, the exploit the labor companies, the poison the environment companies. What happened to our tribe? You might say we grew up. I might say we gave up. I might say we were co-opted big time.
For instance, the Vietnam War was the model, the prototype for all the shit wars we have made since then.(El Salvador, Nicaragua, Iraq, Afghanistan, Colombia, god knows what other countries) One of the great successes of the anti-war movement in the day was our gift for getting and keeping media coverage. Well, that might have worked in that protest, but the powers that be certainly learned their lesson. They bought the media outlets. (What war profiteer owns CBS? NBC? and so on.) We won a battle but lost the war. I am kind of devastated by being out manoeuvred.
Maybe the great tribal feeling was our substitute for the bonding that the soldiers had in WW11. Maybe it was our substitute for making it through the Great Depression. Maybe my young friend is right. I'll have to think about it.
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