Musings: "Dirty Fucking Hippies"

I was intrigued by an Anonymous comment left on yesterday’s post:

Joan said "I found it amusing that Diane is a former Taylor Camper. Doncha just love the evolution of those great ''60s values?'"

Taking the evolution of one individual's values and implying an entire generations values evolved in a like manner indicates unfounded bias. John Harder of Zero Waste Kauai was also a former Taylor Camper, and still seems concerned about the planet.

What have you got against the '60's generation? Anti war, civil rights, women's rights, black and Chicano power, gay, lesbian and transgendered rights, free speech, questioning authority, alternative media and the environmentalism were all resurgent movements in the '60's.

I may be wrong Joan, but it seems the values you express in this blog are largely from the sixties or don't you agree with these sentiments

And then the commenter left a link to a youtube video that presented still images of war, environmental devastation, capitalist excesses, political corruption and other ills of the past 50 years, accompanied by a gritty narrative that lays out the ongoing decline, punctuated by the frequent refrain: “the dirty fucking hippies were right.”

It’s true that I share the values that the video reflects, and that "the dirty fucking hippies were right."

“But what bothers me about the ‘60s,” I told my neighbor Andy, when we met up on the road while I was walking Koko this morning, “is the way it created all this momentum and then just stalled out.”

“That’s because so much was done in the ‘60s,” Andy said, naming off the same things that Anonymous had cited, although I did have to point out that feminism and questioning authority got their start well before the 1960s. He then talked about how the ‘60s generation had broken open a closed, conservative society and achieved long-lasting social changes that are still in place today.

“I don’t disagree that major changes did occur,” I said, “but it’s not like all the problems have been solved, as the video points out. And with some things, like the environment, things have actually gotten worse. So what happened to the values and movements that birthed the push for social change?”

“The generations that followed didn’t pick up the ball,” Andy said. “We started it and got it all going and it was up to those who followed to carry on.”

“That’s the other thing that annoys me about the ‘60s generation,” I said. “There’s this smug attitude of oh, we did so much, so now we can just kick back and drive our Lexuses and drink our lattes and build up our 401-Ks. Meanwhile, they failed to mobilize or inspire subsequent generations to carry the torch, including their own kids. The ‘60s generation turned out to be the biggest consumers in the history of the planet, aside from perhaps their kids.”

Andy said he could agree that if the ‘60s generation had failed in any way, it was in spoiling their kids, giving them too much (and, IMO, failing to make them work for it). But he wasn’t willing to agree that the ‘60s generation failed because the movements it started stalled out, or that activists sold out.

Yes, it’s true that many activists are still active, and Andy and I both acknowledged that we were dealing in generalities. But it is also true that many of those from the ‘60s generation have drifted into materialistic complacency.

Andy pointed out that the right has been extremely aggressive in demonizing the ‘60s values and the people who held them, which had the effect of pushing them further to the fringe and making it difficult to pick up new converts. There's definitely something to that. Just look at the War on Drugs, which was launched by Nixon, and as the video noted, the word peace has become a pejorative in this era of Homeland Security and the War on Terror.

And part of the problem lies in societal complacency, Andy said. Subsequent generations took feminism and equal rights and other such accomplishments for granted, forgetting the struggles that created them. People still hold the values that led to those changes, he said, but they don’t have the passion accompanied the movement to implement them.

Then he observed that part of my problem is I hold the belief that everything can be fixed, so I think the ‘60s generation failed because we still have so many ills.

I’ll admit I’m a utopian, but isn’t that a ‘60s value? And I’ll also admit that I do wonder how people who embraced those values deeply at one time seem to have just let them fade away, much as I wonder how people can shift from being a Democrat to a Republican.

“You guys should be out there fighting,” I admonished Andy, who said he still was, to a certain extent, but the fact is, he’s tired.

And that brings me to my original point. If you failed to instill your values and passions in future generations, and you’re too tired to carry on, no wonder the world isn’t getting any better.

I probably could have developed this more thoughtfully and deeply, but I’m rushing to attend a seminar on fair housing laws, which is probably one of those legacies of the ‘60s.

But lest the ‘60s generation get too cocky about their accomplishments, I’ll leave you with the words of Taylor Camp chronicler John Wehrheim, who also provided me with the link to this very amusing article:

"We threw the baby out with the bathwater. It was all over as soon as the counter-culture idealism and art of the sixties was packaged and marketed as a billion dollar entertainment industry and our heros and idols changed from barefoot gurus with begging bowls and chillums to rock stars in limousines chugging Dom Perignon and hooving coke."