Trump Trainwreck - Ongoing diary of betrayal and evil

[Bob Butler 54]

(01-22-2017, 05:49 AM)Galen Wrote: Whatever the hippies were doing it certainly was not thinking.  At this point you are lucky if you can get a Boomer to admit they were a hippie.  Just imagine a whole bunch of people thinking and acting just like Eric the Obtuse except they are about fifty years younger and didn't have the collapse of the Soviet Union so they were much more open about being communist or socialist.

I didn't get to San Francisco during the Summer of Love. I wore bell bottoms, but everybody my age was wearing bell bottoms. I don't know think I was a true all out hippie by most reasonable definitions.

But in my youth, there were still black and white bathrooms, water bubblers, restaurants, etc...

In my youth there were coat hanger abortion, blatant job allocation prejudice by gender and other forms of overt gender discrimination.

In my youth, the GIs were still into the Domino Theory. It was felt necessary to defend every nation against communist aggression, no matter how wretched that government was, and no matter that nobody was willing to send enough troops over to cleanly quash an insurgency. What I saw then was a quagmire war to prop up a wretched government.

Today there are vile stereotypes of what hippies were like. There are entirely inaccurate propaganda impressions being passed off as true by people who weren't there.

It is true that nobody is wearing bell bottoms, tie dye and love beads anymore.

Try to restore mid 20th century prejudice though, or start a quagmire war, and a blue boomer will get quite impassioned very quickly. Even if the old fashions are dead, the old passions are not far beneath the surface, as you ought to know quite well. The Blue Boomer stereotype of idealistic, impassioned and stubborn has a basis in the Awakening of our youth. We saw the ugly side of the 1950s. We remember what the newer generations never experienced.

The stereotypical hippie might be considered a Feeler under the Myers Briggs scheme. There is truth in the old mantra of 'Love, Peace and Rock N' Roll'. There was a togetherness and comradeship in the old days. There was no lack of intellectual discussion, however. We didn't have internet message boards to endlessly debate things. It was done verbally in dorm rooms. In my case, I attended a 'American History' course in my high school led by a teacher who favored Dylan and Thoreau. The theme of protest against injustice was overtly taught in public schools. There were Thinkers among the awakening boomers. Sit us down with a traditionalist conservative of the time, and we could hold an intellectual debate with as much or little merit as we see today, just with no emoticons.

There were a few communes started, farms owned jointly by a bunch of kids. These were few, far between, and failed early on. There were a few among our generation that bought into Marx. They got nowhere. Nixon might have thought the SDS and the Democratic Party were thoroughly infiltrated by Soviet spies, and some modern conservatives still echo Nixon's thinking, but Nixon was paranoid delusional. Marx wasn't a big deal, not compared to Dylan, Peter, Paul, Mary, John, George, another Paul and Ringo.

Eric? He's no more the pure Hippie archetype than I am. Few of the hippie generation are into mystical thinking. His recent eagerness to leap into quagmire wars in the Middle East is quite atypical of the blue half of his generation. He's also an extreme partisan, and I am dubious about any extreme partisan being typical anything.

But I suppose you will build a vile stereotype around him. That's what extreme partisans do.