I Miss the Hippies

And I’m talking about the authentic hippies, the Haight-Ashbury variety, not the current industrial neo-hippie strain that has as much in common with their forefathers as a politician has with a honest opinion. They’re just not around anymore. Packed it up years ago and either moved to Arcata, California or quietly merged with the status quo. Suppose Jerry Garcia’s death was the end of their era.

The Dead was the gossamer thread connecting successive generations to the sixties counter culture. Once that thread was cut the hippie ethos and lifestyle slowly dissipated into history books and bittersweet nostalgia. The locus for replenishing the shelves was gone. I’m sure many don’t miss them and a great deal more don’t notice they went quietly into that dark night but I for one wish they still roamed the land.

I miss seeing that occasional small troupe of hippies wandering the city streets. They always seemed anachronistic to me, the last furtive whisper of our hunting-gathering ancestors, a vestige of our days spent in nomadic tribes. I was never a hippie myself, not in the truest sense of the word, though some of my friends were. I could relate to them though and had more in common with the traveling hippie than I did with the beer funneling frat boy, although I felt comfortable navigating either world. But the hippies had this cultural amnesia I could appreciate.

They reminded me that no matter how suffocating and intoxicating popular culture and capitalistic ego-nomics became the opportunity to jump ship existed. I could always choose to ditch the hegemonic social paradigm and live a life in the shadows of acceptable. The hippies were kind of my mediation bell. A reminder that Life is a process and a choice, that the world I live in is a fluid matrix of my changing beliefs and what I see is the result of what I believe. It’s easy to navigate life on auto-pilot, to forget we’re creative beings and the source of all things.

I’m not saying hippies were the pinnacle of civilization. The thought itself is amusing. Like any culture, hippies could be inflexible and intolerant of diversity of thought. In many ways, the hippie ethos wasn’t so different than a staunch Republican one or a fundamentalist religious one. You close the mental box around yourself, insulated from others who don’t share your beliefs, getting drunk on the piety of your way.

But it’s all relative and personal. Hippies remind me of one thing, someone else, something else. In any event, they’re not around anymore and I, for one, miss them. Their troubadour’s own song is a fitting end to their days gone by,

Like a steam locomotive rolling down the track
He’s gone
He’s gone
and nothin’s gonna bring him back.

September 25 2006 11:18:14 AM EDT