General Discussion

greenman3610

(3,947 posts) Fri Jun 15, 2018, 03:44 PM Jun 2018

Update: The latest "Hippies won after all" article

https://www.gq.com/story/the-hippies-won

(aside: you still have to vote)

It can be hard to see it sometimes, what with the current occupant of the Oval Office and how he's the direct heir to the human being most anathema to hippie-ism: Richard Nixon. But the secret truth is that hippie culture won. That's right, you chia-seed motherfuckers. You Transcendental Meditators. You alkaline-water drinkers. You Goop readers with your mushroom face masks and your vampire sprays. You don't believe me? How many yoga studios come up in Google Maps when you open it? How many of you have seen a slice of sprouted-grain bread?

The hippies may not have won immediately—we prefer leadership through consensus over single-minded will to power, feel me?—but they won. Their most cherished obsessions—sustainability, solar panels, downward dogs, mindfulness, mushroom masks, farm-to-table, biodynamism in wine and all else—are all the ideological and practical offspring of what was considered a threat to regular America in the '60s. Is Mercury in retrograde not as close as many of us come to religious belief anymore?

Or, here's a novel idea: Maybe it's because hippie values are enduringly good. Preserve the environment, treat your body well and the people around you well-er, chill out, be tolerant, don't tread on others, be compassionate, even to yourself. These are, I would argue, not values that belong to one end of the political spectrum. They're human values. And hippie-ness was always more about values than about gaining power, so it makes a kind of sense that Transcendental Meditation is the legacy of the era, not President McGovern.