Peace, love, anarchy!
That was the cry of the 1960s counter culture — well, dope was in there somewhere, too, but I spent enough time smoking it that I can no longer recall where.
In 1997, as we swim in a multimedia sea of anger, discontent and ominous rumblings about faraway wars, it’s clear that what America needs now are a few good hippies.
Actually, hippies never left, we just mutated. It’s sometimes hard to recognize us, but our fingerprints are unmistakable. Perhaps the most powerful political example of the hippie ideal these days is the NRA.
Now before you get your love beads in a twist, remember that hippies were first anti-establishmentarians. We did not want the heavy hand of the, dare I say, “jack-booted oppressor” on our backs. In the ’60s we wanted to be left alone to fire up our joints and practice free love. Our NRA siblings desire nothing more than the freedom to blast pigeons and deer with their M-16s and practice the military maneuvers that will keep Michigan City, Ind., safe from Bosnian Serbs. “Hey man, if it feels good, do it.”
Another political offshoot of hippiedom is the Libertarian Party. Founded in 1978, this party of yet more anti-establishment idealists who, with their support for the complete dismantling of the government, legalization of prostitution, drugs and all adult sexual practices, makes their brothers and sisters in the environmental and civil rights movements seem downright Republican by comparison. “Make love, not war.”
Cyberspace is the greatest hippie hangout of all time: Wholly lawless, born of anarchy and dedicated to the celebration of individual expression; breaking down all barriers of age, sex, skin color, even geography; where the Louvre and the FBI, the skinheads and eggheads, pink supremacists, brown nationalists, Newt Gingrich and Kermit the frog all romp in graphically interfaced techno-bliss. The age of Aquarius at the speed of light.
I would love to hail all this as the triumph of the hippie movement. Popular culture has embraced thing-doing, authority-questioning and trancendence-seeking. It has dropped, however, one of the most important hippie tenets — a commitment to peace and love.
Actually, we’ve not lost our commitment. We’ve just temporarily lost our faith that our kindest sentiments constitute a viable social strategy. This is partly a matter of fashion. The 1960s popular culture was awash in never-ending songs of brotherhood, inclusion, non-violence and the like. The anger and frustration that many of us felt at the Vietnam War and social injustice were tempered by the pacifistic voices of Peter, Paul and Mary, Timothy Leary and Martin Luther King Jr.
But after we heard and memorized the songs and speeches, we, as humans are wont to do, looked for the next thrill, the next thing to believe in, a new mantra to chant. As noble as they were, our Woodstock dreams could not sustain themselves indefinitely. As Oscar Wilde observed, “In the end, every hero becomes a bore.”
We also lost what little patience we had. We wanted instant utopia, the promised land, right now, this minute or at least this decade. When problems that took millennia to develop remained unsolved after a few decades (though we made monumental strides), we lost our faith in the solutions we’d devised.
Now is the time to reclaim our heritage, to revisit our shaggy roots, however gray they might now be. The conformity, timidity and mindless kowtowing to authority of the ’50s has been forever overthrown. (If you doubt me, listen to what chest-thumping, flag-waving, self-proclaimed superpatriots like Gordon Liddy now say about the president of the United States.) The moon is in the seventh house and the new age is dawning. All we need, brothers and sisters, is love.
