On Being a Hippie
We really thought we were the start of something. We were founding a new, open society in which we wouldn’t need careers or even jobs. It would be a latter-day version of Karl Marx’s description of a 19th-century utopia in the Communist Manifesto: We’d live communally and “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner.”
I’ve managed to lead my life somewhat in that manner (though without hunting, fishing, rearing cattle, or practicing other manly arts of the 19th century). I’ve basically done what I wanted to do and made a living out of self-expression and not-for-profit activity. I’ve lived collectively, too — for three years.
Yes, I turned on, tuned in, and dropped out — halfway. Hippie identity took a hold on me, and I never shrugged it off.
Most of the landmark countercultural events, however, happened without me in attendance. Born at the tail end of 1951, I was a distant spectator for Mississippi Freedom Summer, the San Francisco Summer of Love, the Chicago Democratic Convention, the formation of various rural communes, etc. I too busy trying to get out of my parents’ apartment and to find my first going-all-the-way lover, both of which I managed to do at age 17 when I moved to the East Village in the autumn of 1969. That’s when the Sixties began for me.
(My one example of hippie precocity: I took LSD before I hit puberty. But I’ll save that story for another time . . .)
I stayed only a year in that East Village apartment (E. 5th between 1st and A, $68.77 per month for a fifth-floor studio). Then I strapped a knife to my belt, a red bandana around my knee, and a nylon-string guitar to my back, to go hitchhiking across the country to see if there was still anything interesting going on in Haight-Ashberry. En route, I got a short story published for the first time, in Boulder (CO) Magazine — I appeared uninvited at their office and met the editor, who to my amazement took me up into the mountains and fed me macrobiotically for three days while I wrote a story about leaving New York City.
(Only two weeks later, however, I was back in New York, having enjoyed a 24-hour psychotic experience on a heavy dose of Sunshine LSD that landed me in jail for one night in Venice, California. I’ll save that story for another time, too . . .)
The point that’s wedged somewhere amidst this nostalgic claptrap is that, as I said, we thought we were the start of something — and in many ways, we were right. When I was first in high school, for example, girls weren’t allowed to wear pants to school and their career possibilities were basically nursing, teaching, clerical work, and housewifery. Yale University didn’t even admit women until the year after I graduated (Ellen O. from the year behind me broke that barrier). Now women make up nearly 60% of the undergraduate college students of America.
Abbie Hoffman said it best:
(Poor Abbie. He regretted nothing, then killed himself — but not before he opened my mind even more powerfully than LSD.)
Consider this: The counter-counterculture that was launched by the “Silent Majority” and the Christian Right immediately after the 1970s has taken forty-five years to land us in the lap of Donald Trump. I guess that’s a testament, of sorts, to how much we hippies were, indeed, the start of something — of new kinds of freedom for lots of people, and a deeply felt alienation from the dehumanizing impacts of capitalism.
A more pessimistic appraisal, however, would suggest that we were actually the end, not the beginning, of something: the end of social experimentation, nonconformity, communality, pleasure, celebration, and even hope.
And now we stand, holding our guitars and our sarongs and wondering, What happened?
What about you? Did you consider yourself a hippie? Do you still? Do you hold the identity in high regard, despite the “dirty hippie/stoned-out hippie/hippie-dippy” stereotyping of the media? What did happen to our tribe? Please tell us an anecdote: about the drugs, the fashions, the sex, the demos, the festivals, the beliefs, the spirituality, the illusions, the disillusionment, the visions, the music . . .
(If anyone wants a matted copy of my Woodstock Plastic Model artwork at the top of this article, click here.)
I never considered myself a hippie, but definitely define my generation as "the 60s generation". I don't count as a baby-boomer since that started in 1946, and I was born in the middle of WW II (even lived for two years on an American army base in Newport News VA.) I may or may not have taken LSD, since there was one time when someone put something in a birthday cake on the kibbutz, and I had an out of mind/body experience. The kibbutz nurse went from room to room to try to figure out what had happened. Of course, I had my guitar, and until the Yom Kippur War ended my desire for a music career, sang along with The Young Bloods, "Come on you people now, everybody get together, try to love one another right now." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdxUIZOzd5E I managed to hear Timothy Leary lecture at the World's First Singles Expo in New York in 1980. What I learned from him is that you can only absorb 8 ideas in a single hour. And together with Laura I was at that tribute for Abbie Hoffman at The Paladium in New York in 1989, which I felt was a tribute to our entire generation. Back in the early 70s, there was a glossy English language magazine called "Israel Magazine", run by a guy named Maurice Carr who was a nephew of Isaac Bashevis Singer. One day he had the brilliant idea of devoting a whole issue to the kibbutz, written by kibbutz members. He approach me to contribute an article about what motivated me to come to live on a kibbutz. So I wrote an article which began "“I came to the kibbutz because I consider myself part of a world-wide movement to change the world for the better, like Joan Baez, Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Mark Rudd, the Chicago 7 and others in the States, and all the 1968 students like Danny the Red (Daniel Cohn-Bendit) and Rudy Dutschke on the barricades in France and Germany. We are building an alternative society on the kibbutzim, alongside the collectives, communes and free universities in Europe and the States…” He didn't like that, or any of the other articles, all of which he consider too radical, so we were all paid a kill fee. We did start something, and many of us haven't given up.
Sure I did it, the turn on , tune in, drop out sort of thing--and lets include group love and other transgressive social behavior and it led to wonderful new understandings of myself and my most intimate friends and partners, and of the world, and also all kinds of suffering and the end of 1 marriage and the beginning of another (still ongoing) and 2 years of crying in the aftermath, and the epicenter of all this was a farm we rented in Ellenville, NY from 1971-2, where we raised chickens and briefly had 2 goats, and sold eggs, made massive custards, and invited friends up from NYC for stoned out weekends. And we often felt we were on a spiritual quest, hoping to see God, or to get a good fix on this cosmic consciousness things we felt we were "manifesting." And we read Carlos Castaneda, and read about Tmothy Leary. And wore truly worn out jeans with patches--because when you drop out, you don't have money for new clothes. And I foreswore shaving my legs and under my arms and grest my hair long etc etc etc. So yes great memories, and I've spent most the rest of my life (now 81) unwinding the cause & effect karmic path that got so very intense back then. I never got to Woodstock. My current hubby got close and couldn't stand the traffic jam and the rising nightmare possibilities of how it would be to leave something that was so hard to get to, so turned around and never once regretted this. So yes, the 60's for me started in 1968 and lasted until about 1973--then sober unpacking of it all followed.