Hippie Nostalgia

Anyone that Googles “hippie” will find a plethora of web sites that claim to be hippie-oriented. Most of them are trash and only want to sell clothing. The rest, though, are strikingly nostalgic of the 1960s, the golden era of hippiedom where the counterculture really stuck it to The Man. (Well, not really, but it sure was fun to pretend!) The point is, there’s a whole lot of hippies reminiscing about the good old days of cheap weed, free love, good music and a sense of wonderment and possibility. One wonders where these folks are these days. As we noted in a previous post, many of the original hippies are now in positions of power and influence, having traded in their tie-dye for button downs. Others are slowly eking out an existence selling pottery and homemade apple butter at northwest farmers markets. Still others, though - and probably the majority - are working middle range jobs in some shitty office somewhere, earning a decent but in-no-way-earth-shattering wage, and dealing with a bulging midsection and a receding hairline. These former hippies still profess many of the same values they did while young, but with a catch: they have modified their original values to suit their current reality. Thus, a formerly staunch environmental advocate drives an SUV, because gee, they just really need all that space. A formerly fist-pounding social justice advocate now agrees with people who complain about the “damn Mexicans” because, well, they’re ruining property values in the neighborhood. The former LSD fanatic now chastises his son for smoking weed.  It reminds me of an old hippie refrain...Meet the new boss, Same as the old boss.