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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