My friend Rasberry, longtime co-author, and the original hippy, lives among hundreds of surviving hippies in Sonoma County.
Rasberry reports that many of her pals are deeply unhappy with the world because they have bought into Lefty Fundamental Armageddonism. Rasberry feels there must be some way to help hippies and former hippies to understand that the world of commerce and modernity has delivered many of the qualities that (we) hippies dreamed of.
I’ll briefly list the elements of the hippie dream and compare them to the current world of commerce.
Hippy dreams: a daily life of fun, theater and excitement; a world of equality, where people dealt directly with each other as equals in an open caring way; a world where there were no secrets, problems were solved on a direct person to person basis. The hippy dream world had much self-administered health care, good environmental practices including foods and large intimate communities with open and accepting sexuality.
Have I left anything major out of the dream? Obviously, I left out music and drugs. Clearly we still have plenty of music and drugs. Marijuana is now de facto legal in California and a few other places.
Rasberry is right. We have moved a long way in the hippy direction. The definition of the modern world of commerce is: great autonomy for individuals and freedom of self-expression. Commerce is pro-merit and anti-heirarchy.
I think that modernity has created and continues to create a stunning open space for fun, creativity and any social structures that spontaneous people want to create: think performance art, which is everywhere, think flash crowds and think about Burning Man and the hundreds of ongoing year-round Burning Man offspring.
We have Whole Foods and organic foods are now 20% of the retail food market. Kaiser and most HMOs include acupuncture, bodywork and many holistic practices. Mediation is the most common form of dispute resolution, far exceeding the use of courts on a neighborhood and local level.
Salli and I live happy, fulfilling and exciting lives. We are nothing special and we don’t get government money nor did either of us get a large inheritance. Virtually everything we hippies wanted is here and virtually nothing restrains us from creating the kinds of communities we want.
We just no longer are sure we want to live in close intimate communities after we tried it a few decades ago.
I'm with Rasberry. Most of the hippy dream is here. How do we let the hippy world know this so they can be free of their sorrow and dread?