Hippie

A hippie (or hippy) is a member of a liberal counterculture, originally a youth movement that started in the United States and the United Kingdom during the mid-1960s and spread to other countries around the world. The word hippie came from hipster and was initially used to describe beatniks who had moved into New York City's Greenwich Village and San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district. The term hippie was first popularized in San Francisco by Herb Caen, who was a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle. The origins of the terms hip and hep are uncertain, although by the 1940s both had become part of African American jive slang and meant "sophisticated; currently fashionable; fully up-to-date". The Beats adopted the term hip, and early hippies inherited the language and countercultural values of the Beat Generation. Hippies created their own communities, listened to psychedelic music, embraced the sexual revolution, and used drugs such as cannabis, LSD, peyote and psilocybin mushrooms to explore altered states of consciousness.

Young hippie people near the Woodstock festival in August 1969.

Quotes

• The appropriation of radical thinking by lazy, self-obsessed hippies is a public relations disaster that could cost the earth.
  • Ben Elton, Stark. Court, Hippies and Love at First Sight (1989)

• You can't bomb for a humane reason. What we should do is just Mother Teresa them to death with love. It's that old hippie nonsense but it's still the best stuff there is.
  • Ken Kesey, Trip of a Lifetime. Quotations from an interview in The Sun Times [South Africa] (29 August 1999); interview later quoted in "Still hippie, still trippy" in The Sydney Morning Herald (16 October 1999)

• I sought a different path than that of my parents. I totally rejected meditation and all the spiritual shit they built their lives on. Looking at the once idealistic hippie generation who had long since cut their hair, left the commune, and bought into the system, we saw that peace and love had failed to make any real changes in the world. In response, we felt love and despair and hopelessness, out of which came the punk rock movement. Seeking to rebel against our parents' pacifism and society's fascist system of oppression and capitalist-driven propaganda, we responded in our own way, different from those before us, creating a new revolution for a new generation. Painfully aware of corruption in the government and inconsistencies in the power dynamics in our homes, we rebelled against our families and society in one loud and fast roar of teen angst. Unwilling to accept the dictates of the system, we did whatever we could to rebel. We wanted freedom and were willing to fight for it.
  • Noah Levine, Dharma Punx: A Memoir (2003)

• When I came to California, it was the mecca of the world. Every young person on the planet wanted to be here. It was the heart of the hippie activity, and it was our culture, our generation, expressing itself at its most festive, so it was a real magnet for the young people … with the love-ins and so on.
  • Joni Mitchell, on coming to California in 1969, as quoted in "Joni on Point" in The Los Angeles Times (7 June 2009).

• Men reached the moon in July 1969, and Woodstock began three weeks later. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that this was when the hippies took over the country, and when the true cultural war over Progress was lost. Today's aged hippies no longer understand that there is a difference between the election of a black president and the creation of cheap solar energy; in their minds, the movement towards greater civil rights parallels general progress everywhere. Because of these ideological conflations and commitments, the 1960s Progressive Left cannot ask whether things actually might be getting worse.
  • Peter Thiel, In an editorial published by National Review (2011)

External links

• Summer of Love. A film part of PBS´s American Experience series. Includes the film available to watch online and other information on the San Francisco event known as the Summer of Love as well as other material related to the hippie subculture
• Hippie Society: The Youth Rebellion. A Canadian program by the CBC public network on the hippie rebellion including videos to watch
• UK Hippy. Long running British discussion forum covering all aspects of the British Hippy Counter-Culture from the 1960s to present day.
• Sixtiespix An archive with photographs of hippie culture.
• Hippie Movies & TV Shows 1960s and early 1970s hippie and youth culture on film and TV.