My friend Alice, who is young, wants me to write about the positive effects that the hippies have had on our society.
I was in a great place to be part of the hippie world. I was business manager of Glide Memorial Church, the emotional, spiritual, charitable and political center of the hippies. I was on the Portola Institute Board and the Point Foundation board, the parents of the Whole Earth Catalog and New Games. I founded the Briarpatch Network, the locus of the hippy business world. I co-wrote The Seven Laws of Money, the hippy money bible. I am also a long time close friend of Salli Razberry the mother of hippy and my co-author on many books.
This hippy blog has four parts. This first part is on responsibility. One part each is on: food, health and presentism. The hippies changed America and much of the world -- for the better, I will argue.
The hippies rejected the world around them as hypocritical. The world drank booze in large quantities pretended to be nice to each other and tried to keep a lid on anything that resembled chaotic fun. Hippy was rebellion. Rebellion with the sole intention of creating a better world for the hippies -- a happy world. The hippy world had no ideology, no rancor and no self-righteousness.
The key to hippiness was hanging out with friends in the present. Unrestrained fun, happiness and pleasure. Everyone was welcome. Leave all baggage behind, we only live in the moment. “What is your astrological sign?” was a tool to make everyone entering hippydom an equal.
Technically speaking, the economic liberation that hippies enjoyed was possible because America is so rich that 20 people can live on the wages of one person working part time. That is still true today but 20 people can’t emotionally live comfortably together any more.
Hippies took total responsibility for themselves as a group. In communal houses and apartments, hippies pooled their money and bought food wholesale -- sometimes directly from farmers. The shopping mechanism was affectionately called a food conspiracy. The hippies promptly set up their own health clinics (the Haight-Ashbury Free clinic is still going) their own used clothing depositories and countless small food, auto repair and room mate referral services. Schools, rural communes and urban communes sprang up at the same time as hundreds of thousands of the leading edge of the baby boomers dropped out of standard life to join hippydom.
The abundant hippy free time was used to hang out, share music, sing songs, smoke pot, drink cheap wine, lie in the park and test every drug that anyone could find.
The group responsibility had the goal of mutual pleasure.