Introduction: The Roots of the Hippie Idea

      Our generation, way back when, played a major role in spreading some lovely, meaningful and transformative ideas about:

 peace, freedom, equality, liberation, diversity, toleration,

choice, nonviolence, sexual openness, mind-altering drugs,

protecting the environment, nonconformism, lifestyle experimentation,

meditation, gender freedom, the transformative power of technology

and the importance of ecstatic experience.

       Quite a list, no? And behind them all, maybe, an attempt to move beyond a kind of sober, constricted, work-a-day—straight—way of dressing, way of being, way of thinking.

       Where did these ideas come from?

       They filled the lyrics of the songs we listened to. They helped some among us push forward the civil-rights, anti-war, women’s-rights, LGBT-rights, animal rights and environmental movements, not to mention the much more recent legalization of marijuana and the newly resurgent interest in psychedelics.

       And we—or at least some of us—deserve considerable credit for experimenting with and working through these ideas and for our commitment to them. But most of these ideas themselves were not original to the long-haired kids many of us were in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Indeed, the long hair itself was hardly original to us.

       So, where did we—we hippies, we war protesters, we crusaders for equality—get our ideas?

       Were they borrowed from the various liberation movements themselves? Or from the Beatniks?

       How important was the the idea of the open range traversed by television cowboys and promised by the automobile, television and California?

       Were hippies a flowering of Modernism or of anti-Modernism? Was rock ‘n’ roll as important in the development of our thinking as we remember it being?

       And to what extent were our explorations furthered—or even created—by the unprecedented post-war economic boom in the United States in particular, which gave some of us the liberty to turn on, tune in and drop out with the confidence that we still might, after a bad trip, drop back in again?

       Those are the questions Neil Offen and I—with your help, we hope—will begin to explore in a series of articles.

       We would love to hear—in the comments or emailed to WritingAboutOurGeneration.com—your thoughts on where to look for the ideas that filled hippie heads and what we (or they) were or were not able to accomplish with them.

       And do let us know if you have interest in undertaking part of this investigation.