Golf Courses

Hippies hate golf courses, and the game of golf in general. They hate the courses because they require tons of water and chemicals to keep the grass green and free of unwanted pests. As well, they say, golf course construction destroys natural areas that would otherwise play host to tons of critters and native wildlife. They hate the game of golf for different reasons, namely that it is a sport principally enjoyed by the moneyed class and, especially, the good-ole-boy network of corporate executives, politicians and other power brokers that has made positive social change so difficult to attain in myriad areas. Well, they might have a point on that last bit. But as for the environmental stuff, I dunno. Hippies seem to like their big urban parks, with nicely mown lawns and pruned hedges and trimmed trees and groomed walking paths. Really, just take out the tee box from the local golf links and it would look just like Portland’s Laurelhurst Park. And I never hear the hippies complaining about Laurelhurst Park…

Addicted to Oil

Hippies the world over are crying foul over the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The pollution will destroy wildlife for decades in the region, they say. The spill–the worst environmental disaster in the nation’s history–offers a clear glimpse of the dangers we face due to our addiction to oil, they say. It is, after all, a complete vindication of what the hippies have said for decades…oil is dirty! Extracting it is harmful to the environment! It can’t be done “in an environmentally responsible way” as oil execs have long argued! Well, guess what? Those hippies will need to make some serious changes if the oil stops flowing. Let’s have a look at some of the products that hippies use and/or consume that are derived from oil:

· Plastic water pipes.

· Bean bags.

· Lava lamps.

· CDs.

· iPods and iPhones.

· Snowboards and skis.

· Ziplock baggies (for their weed).

· Airplane fuel (for their trips abroad to “find themselves”).

· The plastic containers that hold hummus, baba ganoush, tabouli, tofu, and just about every other food stuff that hippies eat.

· Nalgene water bottles.

· Backpacks.

· Flip flops.

· Birkenstocks.

· Condoms.

· Tatoo ink.

The list goes on and on. If hippies really want to wean the country off oil, they should put their money where their mouth is and give all this shit up!

Backyard Chickens

Northwest hippies love the concept of keeping hens as pets and harvesting the eggs they produce. Sure, such “farm fresh” eggs taste better than the mass-produced ones, and if they are coming from your own hens, they’re cheap, too. But for some reason, regular folks pooh-pooh the idea of allowing city dwellers to keep hens in their backyards. These opponents cite the foul odors that often accompany chicken roosts, primarily caused by the loads and loads of chicken shit that pile up as lazy hippies fail to clean the roosts promptly and adequately. Unfortunately, due to their lack of personal hygiene, hippies are unable to distinguish their own stench from that of their chickens, and inevitably reply, “What odor? I don’t smell anything…”

Six Packs

Hippies hate those little plastic thingies that hold six packs of beer or soda together. I don’t know what they are called, but those plastic thingies represent a mortal threat to various wildlife, according to hippies, so they must be destroyed. Hippies all over the Northwest spend entire days busily cutting up those little plastic thingies, making sure that there are no intact holes remaining that might ensnare the mouth/beak/muzzle/gills/whatever of any living creature. Which, apparently, happens when the discarded little plastic thingies end up in the streams/lakes/rivers/oceans of the world. Which, apparently, is just a guaranteed given. What I want to know is, if these little plastic thingies are such a threat, and are almost certainly guaranteed to end up in the streams/lakes/rivers/oceans of the world, why would any self-respecting hippie ever buy a can of beer or soda, thus contributing to the problem? Cuz it seems I see them everywhere, sipping thirst-quenching beverages out of aluminum cans while sporting tie-dye shirts and Birkenstocks and toting their drums around Portland. Hmm…

Kentucky Fried Chicken

Hippies hate Kentucky Fried Chicken, and they hate it with a passion. I think it has something to do with the way in which KFC and its suppliers treat the chickens that are ultimately served up in the restaurants…they raise them in tiny cages and don’t feed them good, or something like that. Oh, and the workers at the chicken farms use the sick little chicks like soccer balls, kicking them around the yard on lunch breaks. Whatever. It is striking that they get so uppity about a few yardbirds being whacked around, yet don’t give a hoot about Wilbur and the other cuddly pigs on the local farm that get slaughtered for the hippies’ enjoyment of bacon. Hypocrites!

Religion and Nature

Hippies generally decry organized religion, believing instead that spirituality needs no structure or dogma to be relevant and helpful to those who practice it. They prefer to develop their own relationship with a higher power, which for hippies generally means nature, or Gaia, the mother of all things natural. Nature worship, for what it’s worth, doesn’t place any restrictions on humans insofar as morals go. The only precept in nature worship is to treat the earth and its inhabitants well, with respect and all that. Yet, as we have discussed on previous posts, hippies do all kinds of terrible things to nature, such as: freaking out animals with their dope smoking and their drum circles, pillaging the rainforest in search of patchouli, polluting the air with Subarus, utilizing roads cut through pristine forests, withholding vital nutrients from landfills, eating threatened or endangered species, allowing the slaughter of vast crops of plantlife in order to make fuel, allowing the senseless deaths of critters great and small through protection of dangerous carnivorous animals, chopping down perfectly good trees to make plush, three-ply toilet paper, and discharging dangerous chemicals through their urine that eventually cause genetic mutations in fish and other aquatic life. I don’t know what the nature worshiping version of hell is, but clearly hippies are going there, lickity split…

Dam Breaching

Hippies decry artificial dams and are a great supporter of efforts to breach dams in the Pacific Northwest. Their reasoning goes something like this: Dams make it difficult for salmon to get downstream while young, and upstream while mature, leading to ever dwindling populations of wild salmon. Their solution – dam breaching – means tearing down dams that often are used to produce hydroelectric power, one the most “clean” sources of power around. It is startling that hippies advocate such a position, seeing as the lost power would ultimately be replaced by fossil-fuel burning sources (which contribute to global warming, which raises sea levels, which will kill millions in Bangladesh.) But what is even more startling is the amount of salmon the average hippie eats annually. These guys love it on their bagels (a hippie favorite), smoked and mixed in with some cream cheese, or simply grilled on cedar planks on a barbeque. It is estimated that each Northwest hippie eats close to his/her total weight in salmon each year. If they would simply switch to, say, tuna, there would be no need for dam breaching in the first place! Silly hippies…

Drum Circles

Hippies love drum circles and playing bongos and African drums in public spaces. These drum circles can erupt virtually anywhere that hippies congregate, and can last upwards of five or six hours, depending on the attendees’ supply of pot. In other areas of the country (i.e. outside of the Northwest) such confabs are often discouraged because the “music” is considered noise pollution, having been linked to the deaths of various wildlife, such as birds and squirrels and such which, apparently, leap from trees to the concrete below in an effort to escape the monotonous percussion. In the Northwest, however, hippies don’t care about those critters, and the drumming just keeps on going…

Saving the Whales

Hippies are animal-loving folks and, as such, support wildlife preservation and conservation efforts. They get especially excited about efforts to “save” certain species facing extinction. Sometimes, the situation for these threatened creatures is so dire that the normally pacifist hippies take up arms in defense of them, such as the crazy fat bearded dude on that Whale Wars TV program on Animal Planet. That guy – I think his name is Paul Watson, but it might as well be Walrus – thinks it’s OK to send his young hippie crew out in tiny inflatable dinghies to try and stop massive Japanese whalers from harpooning their target. The thing is, they fail. Even if they every now and again are successful in delaying the Japanese fleet’s catch, the fleet nonetheless fills its quota, year after year. Why does that young hippie crew stay on, knowing full well that their efforts are futile? Bragging rights, that’s all. They get the right, in perpetuity, to tell yarns about how they “took on the whale killers” back in the day. Their friends will all be impressed, at least the first dozen times they hear the tales. Their children will have cause to be proud of their mothers and fathers. But in the end, the only whales those kids will see will be the ones at SeaWorld.

Road Rules

Hippies hate logging roads, and were a vocal support contingent when President Clinton implemented the Roadless Rule that banned new logging road construction in the nation’s wilderness areas. Yet, hippies are some of the heaviest users of the nation’s logging roads. They love to go camping and backpacking and snowshoeing and all that, and the best spots to go are often accessible only because of roads that were initially developed for logging. Just think how many new and exciting camping spots would be accessible if more roads were constructed! Damn hippies…

Organic Farming

Hippies like to eat organic food, because organic farming doesn’t use pesticides, herbicides or any other cides, all of which, they claim, are bad for the environment and bad for humans. But, if it weren’t for those very same herbicides, the world would be overpopulated with bugs, and whatever feeds on bugs, like mice and bats. Who needs more freakin’ bats? Not I…

Wildlife Conservation

Hippies love wildlife conservation and recovery efforts for endangered or threatened wildlife species. They championed government efforts to re-introduce wolves in Yellowstone and other mountainous areas of the Intermountain Northwest. They have long supported the special protections allotted to alligators in the Florida Everglades. But what about the countless dogs and cats that are killed each year by Florida gators? What about the hundreds or even thousands of cute little forest critters that are eaten each year by the wolves? I guess hippies don’t care about them much…

Saving the Trees

Hippies like to save trees. They even have a profession known as tree-sitting, wherein said hippies climb trees and hang out, doing nothing for a few weeks (which isn’t really a stretch, considering their daily routines). The point is to stop, or at least slow down, logging of the nation’s forests. But if you’ve ever been in a hippie’s home, you’ll notice they have the softest, plushest toilet paper money can buy, instead of, say, the cheapo single ply stuff that does the same thing using half the resources. I guess they don’t mind logging the toilet paper trees…

Coffee Blues

Hippies love coffee and consume outrageous amounts of it. I don’t know why, maybe it gives them a clearer head when shopping for hookahs and psychedelic Led Zeppelin posters. At any rate, consuming coffee is bad for the environment, a fact that most hippies are unaware of. You see, coffee is a diuretic, which means it makes you have to pee. And when you do pee after drinking coffee, you expel caffeine in your urine. That caffeine eventually makes its way into local streams, where fish live. The fish “breathe” that same caffeine when they take water in through their gills. Caffeine does strange things to fish, most of which are bad. Like causing sterility, hormonal changes and such. No wonder fish are dying out?! If only the hippies cared…