Hippy Roots

My Hippy Roots.

The legend goes that if you dance long
and hard enough, the Fire Faerie will appear

It's been the fashion to make fun of hippies pretty much since the first time someone dodged the draft for peace reasons (which would be maybe 1770 something) or smoked hemp (again, the same period), or put flowers in their hair (since maybe 1000 A.D., when it fell out of fashion), or claimed that the government is involved in a conspiracy to enslave the people (since the invention of democracy, because before that time, the slavery was transparent).  But there's an aspect often overlooked about hippies, that they perform an important function as the heart and conscience at the root of our culture.

Recently I had a chance to revisit my hippy roots (not so deep, since I was raised as a Southern Baptist, went to John Birch Camp, and my parents actually denounced Reagan as a liberal) in a 'gathering', as they are called.  Many people think that gatherings are just gigantic drug fueled orgies of people out of control.  That's pretty much the propaganda that's been around since Charlie Manson first inspired other hippies to stick forks in pregnant ladies bellies (yes, that actually happened).  Dirty, dangerous, out of control.
But this gathering was unique, since it was completely drug free, unless of course you consider alcohol to be a dangerous drug, which most do except the government of South Korea.  Korea is an Alcoholic Nation, and other drugs are simply not available.  So what does a hippy gathering do without drugs?  They spread different manifestations of love; hugs, music, dance, gifts, and most important to the process, the rhetoric of love.  When one feels love for a fellow human, they need to change most of the language structures and habits that are common to 'normal' discourse.  Many of the things we say to each other are said without love, and are cynical, critical, and ultimately un-self-loving.
Now this is usually the point when my more cynical or analytical friends are quick to point out the many contradictions and hypocrisies that hippies are well known for: smoking (a herb) while talking about air pollution or the many toxins in our foods, claiming that appearance is immaterial and then being clearly biased about people wearing suits or other 'conformist' clothing.  Most people just think of hippies as people who don't bathe enough and are clearly full of shit.  Which is fine, even though I have adopted them since about the age of 18 as my people, my family, my tribe; because even hippies themselves have recognized the problem among themselves and have coined a word for the most egregious trespassers on the sum of our common senses: trustafarians, a new portmanteau of 'trust fund hippy' and 'rastafarian' to signify a new breed of douchebag who uses dreadlocks as a ticket to trample upon every one else around them, and generally act entitled.  In other words, the outward appearance of hippies is far too easily mimicked, just as the word 'natural' is too easily hijacked and subverted by the food industry.
Taking all of this into account, I realize it's dangerous to my social standing to even be associated with these people - but at the same time, I cannot but help standing with them, because even though they often fail at their stated goal of peace and love, though they be infiltrated with lazy, useless, parasites who are seemingly rotten to the core, at the very least they are people attempting to make the world a better place, in their own imperfect way.  I honestly don't want to live in a world where people are simply following the Adam Smithian copout of "self interest economics dominates all", which is ultimately based on incomplete observations of the world, and as we are now learning, doesn't jibe with biology, either.
What's even more important to me, is to look at the history of the world since 1960 and realize that actually most of the things that hippies advocated for, which were considered weird, ridiculous, and just plain obscure, are now a standard part of our world; organic foods, whole grain products, almost all things that are now acknowledged to be 'healthy' were things that were 'fringe' and 'bad science' in the 'better-living-through-chemistry' era that spawned them.  Judged by the standards of those times, we'd all have to admit that 90% of us would be considered hippies by at least one of the things we eat, believe, or language that we use.
So I'm not saying you should stop making fun of hippies, who were actually so used to the public ridicule in the 1960's that they rejected the word 'hippy' in 1968, rebranding themselves as 'freaks' (sort of like the activist use of 'queer') and even holding a funeral for the 'hippy' , complete with a coffin and procession down Haight-Ashbury.   By all means, if you need an easy target, go ahead and make fun of these imperfect futurists, because your children will all be just like them eventually, and it may be your last chance to make fun of your own family.
But what I had really hoped is that you might entertain the notion that they actually have a function in our society; that they play an important part in helping us to regain what was lost in the industrialization and fragmentation of our societies over the last few centuries.  I'm sure many anthropologists would have a lot to say about this crude analogy to tribalism, but then again, who has ever met a happy anthropologist? Hypocrites who enjoy the tribal hospitality, only to travel back to the world that is crushing their subjects out of existence, write a book about it and make some coin or further their career...I don't see any of them being called 'lazy idealists', and mostly they are respected because they maintain a distance between the observer and the observed.
Imagine now, for a minute that we are all anthropologists, and that we are living among tribes, only one of which is the hippies.  Other tribes are the sportists, those whose temple is a surfboard and a wave, churchists, those who find communion with others in a building and some magic words, even cynics must be acknowledged as a tribe, since they gather wherever an open conspiracy theory is proposed, stamping out the fire of ideas with their words.
I don't know where this essay is going, so you could just put that inability to finish down to the classic crazed and fruitless hippy way of being, or accept my 'square' version when I say that I'm a little run down and have just run out of coffee.