- Joined
- Sep 21, 2009
- Messages
- 440
So, since people are talking about what they think happened with the hippies and questioning official narratives, I figure I might as well throw my perspective in as well. Outside of California and the Western US, the hippie movement was not nearly as popular as people think, and especially not in the South. The narrative I know is that the hippie movement was made to seem like a much more universal movement across the US than it actually was, when in reality it was mostly happening in the Western US and California. The fact is, back in the days before social media, Hollywood, journalists, and the mainstream media had a lot more power, and guess where most media was produced back then? In and around Los Angeles.
That is to say, the mainstream story of American history from between the emergence of television to about the time social media became popular was extremely California-centric, because that's where all the movie studios and broadcasting companies were emerging. Some of this even continues to this day thanks to Silicon Valley being centered in California.
I think the hippie movement was artificially amplified by the mainstream media, but with an arguably noble goal... to convince mainstream Americans to oppose the Vietnam War, support the Civil Rights movement, and suggest that those issues were causing the youth to lose faith in American society. That is to say, the point of amplifying the movement so much, was to try and get older Americans to worry that the youth were losing faith in American culture and try to win them back. It was basically trying to tell older people, "Hey, if we don't do something about the draft and Jim Crow, more and more young Americans are going to join this counterculture and become total degenerates. We've known for a long time this stuff needed to change, so let's show that our system can be reformed legitimately and try to bring more reasonable youths back from the hippies before it's too late."
Not to say that many Americans didn't sympathize with the hippies, they did, but even most of those sympathetic to some of what they stood for were not hippies themselves. So my impression is, both AQB's perspective and everyone else's can be true at the same time. A lot of black people were living in regions of the US where there weren't many hippies at all, and very far from where it started. So the few hippies they saw might have been white college kids who were emulating what they saw on TV thinking it was "cool" or "trendy" without really understanding what it was about, and possibly maintaining the same racist attitudes they always had while experimenting sexually and doing drugs. While those actually living in California where it all started might have experienced the hippie movement as something closer to its ideological roots, and also more multiracial and inclusive.
From my perspective, the problem with the conventional narrative of that time in history, is simple overgeneralization and thinking of there being one unified hippie movement that everyone participated in, when in reality it was a core movement in California with a lot of different factions, and a handful of imitators in other regions of the US who only emulated the worst aspects of it in a superficial way. So it's one of those situations where I would have to say to both sides "You're not even wrong," and invoke the metaphor of blind men feeling different parts of an elephant and reporting different things. None of them are wrong or lying, they just can't see the whole picture.
That is to say, the mainstream story of American history from between the emergence of television to about the time social media became popular was extremely California-centric, because that's where all the movie studios and broadcasting companies were emerging. Some of this even continues to this day thanks to Silicon Valley being centered in California.
I think the hippie movement was artificially amplified by the mainstream media, but with an arguably noble goal... to convince mainstream Americans to oppose the Vietnam War, support the Civil Rights movement, and suggest that those issues were causing the youth to lose faith in American society. That is to say, the point of amplifying the movement so much, was to try and get older Americans to worry that the youth were losing faith in American culture and try to win them back. It was basically trying to tell older people, "Hey, if we don't do something about the draft and Jim Crow, more and more young Americans are going to join this counterculture and become total degenerates. We've known for a long time this stuff needed to change, so let's show that our system can be reformed legitimately and try to bring more reasonable youths back from the hippies before it's too late."
Not to say that many Americans didn't sympathize with the hippies, they did, but even most of those sympathetic to some of what they stood for were not hippies themselves. So my impression is, both AQB's perspective and everyone else's can be true at the same time. A lot of black people were living in regions of the US where there weren't many hippies at all, and very far from where it started. So the few hippies they saw might have been white college kids who were emulating what they saw on TV thinking it was "cool" or "trendy" without really understanding what it was about, and possibly maintaining the same racist attitudes they always had while experimenting sexually and doing drugs. While those actually living in California where it all started might have experienced the hippie movement as something closer to its ideological roots, and also more multiracial and inclusive.
From my perspective, the problem with the conventional narrative of that time in history, is simple overgeneralization and thinking of there being one unified hippie movement that everyone participated in, when in reality it was a core movement in California with a lot of different factions, and a handful of imitators in other regions of the US who only emulated the worst aspects of it in a superficial way. So it's one of those situations where I would have to say to both sides "You're not even wrong," and invoke the metaphor of blind men feeling different parts of an elephant and reporting different things. None of them are wrong or lying, they just can't see the whole picture.
, and think that Pluto's ingress into 
