Wow. Two posts in one day. I haven't played the game yet. I've been tempted but I stayed away. I'll go to bed shortly. It's just now getting dark here, but O-dark-thirty comes mighty fast. Randy & Rachel are watching "No Country For Old Men." I've sort of watched it too...been checking email, planning my tomorrow, washing dishes, & that kind of stuff while the movie's been running.
I can't say I've been a lot more cheerful since I got home, but I've cleaned out the bag of medical bills (& got the checks ready to mail in the morning!), cleaned out the fridge & washed the dishes. I've washed some clothes too. So I feel like I've accomplished something.
I have been on a hippie wannabe kick lately. I have to wonder about something. Maybe there are some old hippies out there who can answer this for me. It seems to me that becoming a hippie in 2008 is more expensive than living in the mainstream. Now, you can look at this in the long term & think, well, non-sustainable living isn't really cheaper...but that isn't my point. My point is, in the short-term, it seems to be more expensive to eat locally grown food & buy earth-friendly clothing. You can save money on makeup & hair care (of course, if you have a real job you might have to invest in a few grooming products - & again, if you use the "green" stuff it's going to cost you more than the Dollar General store stuff). So, my question is this. Was it more expensive to be a hippie instead of a conformist in the 60's? I don't see evidence that it was...but I was born in 1967 so I don't know this for certain.
I know we didn't have much, & we didn't live like hippies. We lived in a trailer. My parents were young, but they weren't hippies. My mom wasn't anti-hippie. She shared a lot of their values like being for peace & accepting people for what they are. She liked some of the music but she will tell you she didn't "get" the messages, except maybe the ones about stopping the war. Most young mothers in our hometown were like Mom was back then. She liked fashion too much to be a hippie. I can't imagine my mom letting her hair grow wild. Not back then anyway. She probably also cared about the fact that being a hippie wasn't so widely accepted in our hometown back then. At that time she wasn't really ready to take that step.
My dad could've been anti-hippie. He was a clean-cut Merle Haggard fan. You know, "We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee." A few years down the road, Dad let his hair grow out a little & had Elvis-style sideburns, & would've lived in a cabin in the wilderness if he hadn't already owed money on a house in a subdivision. But a hippie he was not, even though his dad owned a VW bus.
I thought hippies were cool back then, but I didn't know about all the protests & drugs. I just knew about the psychedelic vans & clothes & the cool music, the people with long hair who said "groovy" & hung beads in the doorway. Lava lamps were cool, but like VW buses, I didn't associate them with hippies because my non-hippie aunt had one. She also had a gold Nova & watched PBS a lot.
Now I want to be a hippie but I can't seem to get what I want! But for now, I need to go to bed. Later!
2 comments:
That's an interesting question, and one that should be answered before all the people who could answer it personally are gone: how did the economics of being a hippie work out? From what I've read, it seems like there was a lot of begging, borrowing, and stealing going on, as well as a few people who just bought into the culture with their parents' money. (Kinda like Marx and Engels, but I digress...) I suppose some people made and grew and cooked things and sold them to others with money, but beyond that, I don't know.
When I was a kid in the early 1970s, there was a place in town we called "Hippie Corner" where all the long-haired, dirty, scummy hippie types would hang out, smoking. This was near a bus stop and located right outside of a mental health clinic, so one or both of these factors may have come into play. I never saw anything enviable about hippies and the hippie culture, mainly because of the scuzzy bedraggled types I saw at Hippie Corner.
You know, in reality I don't know if I could have been one either. Shortly after I posted this I watched a show about the Summer of Love & I saw a lot of the seedy side of the culture too. I think I am much like my mom on this one - I like all the pretty colors but I like to feel clean!
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