I've been kind of curious about something. Here's a little poll for people over 60.

[Blue_In_AK]

Last edited Sun Apr 6, 2014, 08:29 PM - Edit history (2)

When you were younger, like in your teens or 20s, did you consider yourself


I was a hippie through and through, although I did hold down jobs every now and then. . My only real political involvement was being adamantly opposed to the war and philosophically, at least, a "greenie." I've become much more political as I've gotten older.

37 votes, 2 passes | Time left: Unlimited
	Part of the counterculture, i.e., a "hippie"
	12 (32%)
	A political activist without the sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll
	11 (30%)
	A conventional young person just looking to get married and raise a family
	10 (27%)
	A young Republican
	1 (3%)
	At the suggestion of Malaise and others, some combination of 1 and 2.
	2 (5%)
	Or, like 11Bravo, you were a hippie and then you got drafted
	1 (3%)
	2 DU members did not wish to select any of the options provided.
Show usernames Disclaimer: This is an Internet poll

[hobbit709]

1. We considered ourselves "freaks" more than hippies.

But counter culture all the way.

None of the political activists I knew avoided sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

[Blue_In_AK]

5. I think we called ourselves "heads" at the time.

I first got high in 1967 when I was 21.

[hobbit709]

7. When I started doing acid it was still legal.

[Blue_In_AK]

17. I loved acid.

I can't even count how many trips I took. Probably 300+. Pretty steadily from 1967-1974 or so. Except when I was pregnant. My older brother, who is a Midwest conservative, was amazed that my daughter didn't have two heads. In fact, she's quite normal and amazingly talented musically.

[YOHABLO]

53. Yes that myth .. that LSD messed up your chromosomes .. didn't pan out. But my older sister >

did develop schizophrenia .. maybe predisposed .. who knows? Some of her friends flipped out and others went on to live normal lives. I didn't know of any Conservative dudes doing acid back in the day.

[Raksha]

56. I didn't consider myself a hippie at the time,

and only began describing myself that way a few decades later. I always considered it the great tragedy of my life that I was born too late to be a Fifties beatnik. I never did get into jazz, so I'm not sure how well I would have fit into that particular counterculture. What I really liked was folk music--Joan Baez and early Bob Dylan. But I've definitely always considered myself part of the counterculture, the "still crazy after all these years" crowd. I can't even imagine being any other way.

[frazzled]

2. Combo

Counter culture PLUS political activist. I think that's what most people in the world I knew were: part hippie, part activist. These were not mutually exclusive by any means.

Did anyone NOT do the sex, drugs, and rock and roll to some extent? Did anyone NOT protest the war, tag onto the end of the civil rights movement, participate in early feminist activities to some extent? Not in my circle. They were in many ways of a piece.

[Blue_In_AK]

4. Good point

because even though I wasn't really "actively" political in the sense of actually working on anyone's campaign or whatever, I was always "for" civil rights, women's rights, etc. I always leaned left even before I got more deeply into the whole tuning in and turning on thing.

[HockeyMom]

11. Same here

[GOPee]

49. Frightened

I was scared to death in the 60's at the marches, but still young.. yikes

[TBF]

62. What were you afraid of? nt

[lpbk2713]

3. I wasn't politically active at that time but JFK was the first Prez I voted for.

I was sort of on the altruistic side and I thought he could make the world
a better place. FWIW, I've voted for every Dem Prez nominee ever since.

[tularetom]

6. There was no counterculture until I was 25 or so and I already had 2 kids

We're talking the mid 60's.

I wasn't a hippie and I had a respectable job but I had long hair and enjoyed the occasional doob.

I had already served in the military but I opposed the war.

[SheilaT]

8. I was very conventional when young.

Although, as I like to point out to the young folks these days, I got to have my youth post pill and pre AIDS.

I have gotten more and more liberal the older I get. If I live to be 90 you'll probably be reading about me.

[Raksha]

58. Same here.

Re "I got to have my youth post pill and pre AIDS."

I don't think the Religious Right has forgiven our generation for that yet. Sex without negative consequences? The horror!

[NV Whino]

9. An old high school friend said she considered me the original beatnik

I was flattered.

I sort of missed the hippy stage. None of the sex, drugs and rock and roll for me. Well, ahem, none of the drugs and R&R anyway.

I only became politically active when Bush seized the White House.

[REP]

24. My mother *was* a Beatnik

[Warpy]

10. I was the first two

and ended up being predictable and doing the third after I'd been wild for a few years.

[Blue_In_AK]

12. I got pretty normal, too,

about 1975 or so. I slowed down some when my first daughter was born in 1972, but I was still pretty much "earth mother." When I moved to Alaska (from the Bay Area) in 1975, I got married, got a real job and pretty much stopped doing psychedelics. Still smoke pot, though. It's not really illegal in Alaska.

[RoverSuswade]

13. I was a member of Moral Rearmament (Up With People/Sing Out)

I voted for Goldwater in '64. I was a Young Republican.

[Blue_In_AK]

14. I thought Goldwater was scary as hell,

but he doesn't look so bad in retrospect, compared to some of the Republicans these days.

[idendoit]

15. Far out, man.

[malaise]

16. You need another category

Some of us were politically conscious, participated in marches and protests and helped to register voters. We did love rock and roll and other music and we liked having boyfriends around, although many of us weren't looking for husbands.

[Blue_In_AK]

18. Hmm, that's kind of long to put into a category.

Just kidding. But, yes, there is a lot of overlap. I'll make a "combo" category.

[malaise]

19. It is long

[csziggy]

21. And another

Some of us were just stoned but burned out on politics and cynical about how useful being active was.

The first Presidential election I was able to vote in was in 1972. I knew Nixon was a crook and was appalled that he got such a large percentage of the vote. Then when it was proven that he had stolen the election, I was turned off by politics and didn't think it was worth the effort to be active or even vote.

The man who is my husband convinced me to vote in 1976 - his brother worked on Jimmy Carter's campaign. Over the years I have become increasingly more active but never really lost my cynicism.

To this day I am still convinced that any person who wants to run for office is a megalomaniac and should be disqualified from holding office.

[Blue_In_AK]

23. I'm pretty cynical, too.

I could have voted in 1968, but I didn't because I was so disgusted by Chicago. I really did pretty much drop out for a time, but I managed to vote for McGovern in 1972, slipped up and voted for Ford in '76 (because of Betty, mostly), but have voted Democratic ever since, became a super voter somewhere along the line, but my people hardly ever get elected and when they do, they let me down, so I'm not exactly sure why I bother. Maybe so I can keep my right-to-b**** license.

[DrDan]

20. never a part of the counterculture - yet still antiwar and green

[newfie11]

22. Hippie

I've voted Democratic every time.
I am a democratic socialist!

[11 Bravo]

25. Well, one year I was smoking dope and had hair down to my ass. The next ...

I was carrying an M-16 in the A Shau Valley. Not sure where I fit in.

[Blue_In_AK]

26. I'm glad you made it back.

Looks like I need another category.

[Bandit]

65. Been there done that..

I also was drafted and sent straight to Nam. Did not pass Go. Before I was Drafted though I was most definitely into sex, drugs, and rock & roll. Still am all these decades later. Also did my time in the A Shau Valley though I was no longer a grunt by then. I was a door gunner on a huey gun ship and we helped light up the area.

[WillyT]

27. I'll Be 59 In November... I Wanted To Go To Woodstock, But My Parents Wouldn't Let Me...

Does that count ???

[Blue_In_AK]

28. Yes, of course.

You are OBVIOUSLY an honorary hippie. How could anyone have thought otherwise?

[WillyT]

30. Everytime I Go To S.F. - I Visit Haight Ashbury To Bath In It...

[Walk away]

29. Here is your proof. I was a certified Hippy. (photo see red arrow)

<a href=".html" target="_blank"><img src="" border="0" alt=" photo 456fa485-6b9c-481c-8017-837e218f5f9e_zps9964399d.jpg"/></a>

[Blue_In_AK]

32. Oh, that's great!

Where were you when this photo was taken? I don't have any photos from that time, but I sure wish I did.

[Walk away]

35. That is Homestead in New Your State...

and we were a member run organization of politically liberal youths. Our board members served on a rotating basis and were all 18 years old or younger. Our mission was to create and distribute political art, theater and literature promoting Liberal causes.

Plenty of free sex, drugs and rock n roll! L.R.Y!

[Raksha]

59. What a great picture!

I have no idea where it was taken or what was going on, but I wish I could have been there.

[SteveG]

31. Politicized Hippie

Demonstrations on Campus and participated in the Nov. 15, 1969 march on DC.

[Blue_In_AK]

34. There was one in San Francisco that same day, I think.

Either 1969 or 1970. A huge march, probably 300,000 or more, from downtown out to Golden Gate Park, where lots of bands played and people like Leonard Nimoy and Cesar Chavez gave speeches. That was such an exhilarating day.

[enough]

33. As I remember being young, we did not think of ourselves as being in ANY category.

God, we thought we were something that had never been seen before in the universe. I imagine young people in any age and anywhere on earth feel this way about themselves.

Getting older (I'm about to turn 70) has been a long process of realizing that wasn't entirely true!

As some aged bard once said a long time ago:

Nobody has to guess, that baby can't be blessed, till she finally sees that she's like all the rest.....

That bard may have thought he was being sarcastic and cutting at the time, but I actually think it's pretty basic to realize how much we're all in the same human boat, and knowing that IS a blessing.

I too loved acid. Not 300 trips, probably more like 30. I'd have to say I still love it, even though I haven't had any in a long long time. Over time it seems to be more present without having to take it. Another blessing.

[otohara]

36. Aging Hippie

better dressed and more political now.

[RKP5637]

37. Combo: Pot, democratic, some protests, border hippie, getting through tough

subjects in college, and some more pot! And sex! Lots of sex! And definitely counter-culture!

[pipi_k]

38. At that age

I didn't know what/who the hell I was


There are times when I still don't know

[moondust]

39. Whatever happened to communes?

I'm a little surprised there haven't been some local back-to-the-land "collectives" springing up with the difficult economy and scarcity of jobs. Or maybe there have been and I just haven't heard about them. Don't younger people feel they need to band together anymore the way the hippies sometimes did? I guess a lot of them go on living with their parents.

[dougolat]

54. As an old communard myself, I've wondered about that too.

(It's messy, but the synergy, pooling of resources and talents, and companionship was invaluable)

[NBachers]

40. People's Park alumnus, cross-country hitch hiker, Richard Brautigan, Kahlil Gibran, Kerouak, Jimi,

dealt and scored on Telegraph Ave., tripped through the Smithsonian, cleaned grass on Pink Floyd album covers, busted with pounds of pot and keys of coke, subscribed to political magazines and Paul Krassner's The Realist, made my waterbed frame into a box and chained it on top of my '52 Plymouth and lit out for Miami from Kalamazoo in the dead of winter.

Currently living back in San Francisco, center of the Mission District. I moved here when people thought The Mission was risky. Same little studio apartment since 1992.

Still working on more entries for my hippie resume. I turn 65 on April 10th, and am lucky to have a good local job. I may retire at 70.

Our story continues . . .

[Blue_In_AK]

42. Do you have one of those rent controlled places.

We go back down there to visit once a year, but I can't believe the housing costs now. I lived at Haight and Broderick for a while, then Clement Street, then Ingleside briefly (until we got run off by a biker gang), then Sacramento Street until I moved out to Bolinas in 1971.

[NBachers]

50. Yes, I'm fortunate in that respect- my "Starter apartment" moved up in value quicker than I did.

Things sure have changed. My son and daughter in law are moving here from Glasgow, Scotland later this year. He grew up here; I don't know how they'll get established.

[kwassa]

41. Real hippies were few and far between. Most kids were only playing the role ..

while still going to college and grad school.

To be a hippie was mostly a chance to be voluntarily destitute. Some chose that route but not many.

Many experiments with communes and utopian living ideals did not end well or simply petered out for lack of sustaining interest. Bad drug experiences wiped out others. Haight Ashbury was a prescient example.

[Blue_In_AK]

48. I chose to be voluntarily destitute for a while,

even living in a tipi that I sewed myself on a treadle sewing machine while living on a commune in southern Oregon, and then in a canyon out by Death Valley, a couple canyons over from Charlie Manson's place (a couple years later). I sometimes can't believe I did all that stuff. I would never recommend it to my own kids.

[starroute]

43. Almost nobody I knew in the 60s would admit to being a hippie

And that includes people living in communal apartments in the East Village. Hippies were looked on as dropouts or flower children, and these people were writers or artists or musicians. Some of them had been part of the folk music scene. They were strongly anti-war but not activists. They were getting into the sex/drugs/rock & roll thing to various degrees, but their lives didn't revolve around it.

There's never been a label for what they were -- but if you'd asked them at the time, they would probably have said they weren't into labels.

Of course, I also knew a lot of geeks and computer programmers, some of whom were towards the hippie end of the spectrum and others towards the libertarian end. But that's a whole other category of "none of the above."

[Blue_In_AK]

46. I think there was a difference between East Coast and West Ciast

Of course, we didn't call ourselves hippies then either, since it was a label put on us by "the man," but I myself was of the flower child variety, west Coast subspecies. .

[starroute]

47. That's very likely

New York has always had more of an "artsy" vibe.

[eallen]

44. No "nerd" category?

[Blue_In_AK]

45. God, I just can't keep up with all the categories

[OriginalGeek]

51. I'm not 60 but i wanted to answer for my favorite uncle

My dad's brother. One of my personal heroes. He's the reason I have long hair now. He was full-on bearded hippie when i was kid in the 60s. My dad once told me "Don't worry about too much BUT if the FBI ever comes to ask you anything about your uncle just say nothing" which was easy since I knew nothing but I got the impression that he was involved with some stuff when he was in college. Probably nothing that would even register now-a-days but I do know he protested the war along with a million other hippies.

Sadly he's passed on now but was liberal til the day he died. I do my best to carry on his tradition.

[cilla4progress]

52. Great thread. Very nostalgiac.

Yes, I remember doing mescaline and hitch-hiking with another girl while I was still in high school in 1972!

By 1990 I had become a committed back to the lander, and still living my values of recycling, liberalism, anti-war, and political activism...in many forms. Career-wise, I became a paralegal...based on principles I learned in college (Burlington, VT!) about barefoot doctors in China after the communist revolution!

Happy to report my daughter (only child...population control) is majoring in Environmental Policy and will be spending fall semester in Costa Rica in a kind of commune - School for Field Studies. So glad she turned out good!

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

55. A radical veteran on the GI bill in college and working.

"It was the best of times and the worst of times." Charles Dickens

[madfloridian]

57. I was very conventional. In our area one had to be that way.

My daughter says I always had an inner hippie.

I guess if I had lived in a more liberal area it might have been more visible.

[flamingdem]

60. How about Artiste?

That's another subgroup.

[tblue37]

61. I was a lefty and fairly counterculture, but without the sex and drugs.

I married 3 days before my 20th birthday (I was married August 15, 1970), and then my husband and I left that same day to drive halfway across the country to his first job after grad school as a new college professor. We arrived in our new town the day I turned 20.

He was almost 8 years older than I and *much* more buttoned down. I wanted to just live together, but he feared that his career would suffer if we weren't married, especially since I was an undergraduate. I intended to keep my maiden name, but the university required me to change my name to his in order to get the in-state tuition I was entitled to as a professor's wife, so on both of those counts my more modern sensibilities took a backseat to pragmatism.

But my poor ( now many years ex) husband was often mortified when he and his colleagues would run into me on campus, because I was often barefoot and dressed the way a cute hippie chick was likely to be dressed in the early 1970s. His colleagues thought I was adorable, especially because I was astonishingly smart, even in their subject area, and very pretty at the time. But he was just sure they would look down in him because his wife was not mainstream enough.

I am still unwilling to kowtow to convention in many ways, and after the divorce in 1983 I knew I would never remarry, and despite many proposals over the years I never did. I was never the marrying type, and if academic culture had been more flexible back then, I would not have married in the first place.

I have two brilliant, extraordinary successful children (ages 32 and 34), and while their attitudes and values are closer to mine than to their father's, they are both nevertheless more conventional than I am. Of course, both are in careers that require at least a surface conventionality, but even beyond that I am more "out there" than either of them would find comfortable as their own way of life.

No doubt that is why they both make about 5 times as much money as I do.

[OldHippieChick]

63. I had plenty of sex, smoked lots of

dope, had my phone tapped, marched in several protests

and worked 40 hours a week at the university library and taught Sunday School.

Not sure what that made me, but I considered myself part of the counter-culture.

[Ino]

64. a typical young person in college, embarking on career

not trying to get married and raise a family, FGS

[Blue_In_AK]

67. Of course.

I was generalizing and inadvertently combined a couple of categories there.

I should have had one for "typical young person going to school and working towards a career," and one for "typical young person who married his/her high school sweetheart because the girl got pregnant." That one happened to a lot of my high school friends pre-pill.

[Blue_In_AK]

66. My number one takeaway from this exercise?

It's futile to try to put labels on people.

Thanks for playing, everyone.

[Enthusiast]

68. I think this is appropriate.

[OKNancy]

69. Combo, but of 2 and 3

A political activist without the sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll
A conventional young person just looking to get married and raise a family

Did the war protests, sang Kumbaya, did candlelight marches with my very liberal church
I married at age 20 while a junior in college, had a child at 23. Started a successful business at 26.
I lived my life as a feminist, I didn't just talk about it.

[Blue_In_AK]

70. I like that. :)