Monthly Archives: November 2011

“Thanksgiving” Reminds Us How Gratitude Makes Us Happy

Thanksgiving has been my favorite holiday for quite a while.  Of course, it is wonderful to see family and friends, as well as to eat great food.  We recall how our Thanksgiving holiday is meant to show gratitude for what we have.  For most of American history people had relatively little by current standards.  Now people recite make small gesture of  thanks for their family, friends, faith, flag, wealth or some other external influence.  In fact, Thanksgiving now serves to whet our collective appetites for more. Over the past few decades, Thanksgiving has become the launch pad for an increasingly-crazed, Christmas consumption binge.  Clearly this has changed because capitalism needs people to keep buying more new stuff – see my earlier article “Karl Marx would be Marveling at Capitalism’s Collapse.

This article explains the true nature of gratitude and how to practice it regularly and routinely.  For the last few years at Thanksgiving I have meant to write an article about the relationship between happiness and gratitude.   This year I have done it!  I’m more convinced that how grateful we are for our life, the happier we tend to be.  This is true because focusing on the positive and being thankful for what we have makes us feel better about our situation.  It also is true that we attract more of what we are grateful for into our lives.  First, I want to clearly and carefully express my personal gratitude for where my life is now; and where it is heading.   Next, I have collected and edited some well-written articles about the clear, even scientific, connections between gratitude and happiness.  I open and end with carefully selected quotes about gratitude, happiness, and Thanksgiving.  Click to Learn and Leave Comments.

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Categories: Happiness | Tags: , , | Leave a comment

Hippies Deserve Respect for their Values and Vision

The Occupy Movement owes much to the Hippie Movement of the sixties.  Now, the right wing has predictably started another round of “Hippie Bashing.”   The hippie subculture was a youth movement that began in the United States during the early 1960s and was largely gone by 1973.    The word hippie is from hipster (used to describe kids who flocked into San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district.  Hippies inherited the counter-cultural values of the Beat Generation.  They also created their own communities, listened to psychedelic rock, embraced the sexual revolution, and used drugs such as marijuana and LSD to explore alternative states of consciousness.  Above all, hippies were promoting the idea of peace, love, unity and freedom.

Hippie fashions and values had a major effect on culture, influencing popular music, television, film, literature, and the arts.  Since the 1960s, many aspects of hippie culture have been assimilated by mainstream society.  The religious and cultural diversity espoused by the hippies has gained widespread acceptance.  Their adoption of Eastern philosophy and spiritual concepts has now spread to a wide audience.  The hippie legacy can also be observed in contemporary culture from health food, to music festivals, to contemporary sexual mores, and the cyberspace revolution.  It is also clear that the well-established environmental movement owes a lot to the hippies (i.e., tree-huggers.)

This article includes recent reflections on the hippie movement in light of the occupy movement.  Original writings about the hippies from the sixties are also included.  This article includes quotes from Timothy Leary, Abbie Hoffman, Eldridge Cleaver and others. Finally, there are links to the best hippie videos on Youtube.   Click below to learn more about why the hippies are more important now than ever.

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Categories: Hippie Legacy | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

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