Like Wow! I Didn’t Realize!

Posted on August 24, 2004 in Attitudes Reading

I picked up John Bassett McCleary’s Hippie Dictionary: A Cultural Encyclopedia (And Phraseicon) of the 1960s and 1970s a few weeks ago when I saw it on the shelf at Barnes and Noble. Ever since, I’ve been reading it to learn what I didn’t know back then. Seventies teen that I am, I knew more than I had realized in the way of jargon, though admittedly my rock and roll knowledge was deficient. (When I was a teenager, when adults tried to be cool and ask what my favorite group was, I’d say “The Berlin Philharmonic”.)

McCleary’s lexicon is pointed and defensive of the Hippie legacy. We’re overdue for effective advocacy and accurate interpretation of the Hippie lifestyle, which overlapped with many other movements, some of which were simply dirty, boorish, and destructive such as the 1% clubbers of outlaw bikedom.

A few definitions extracted not at random from the book go far in setting the tone of the times:

hippie a member of a counterculture that began to appear in the early 1960s and expressed a moral rejection of established society. Derived from the word hip, meaning roughtly “in the know,” or “aware.” The true hippie believes in and works for truth. The messengers of sanity in a world filled with greed, intolerance, and war. Numerous theories abound as to the origins of this world. One of the most credible involves the beatniks, who abandoned North Beach, San Francisco, to flee commercialism in the early 1960s. Many of them moved to the Haight-Ashbury area of San Francisco, where they were idolized and emulated by the young university students who lived in the neighborhood. The beats (the hip people) started calling these students hippies, or younger versions of themselves. Actually, the counterculture seldom called itself hippies; it was the media and straight society who popularized the term. Most often, we called ourselves freaks or heads. Not until later did we begin calling ourselves hippies and by then we were “aging hippies.” An alternate spelling seldom used in the United States by people in the know was hippy, but it was spelled that way in England.

true hippie a person who lives by the Golden Rule. Someone who believes in allowing others to pray to any god, sleep with any consenting “adult,” at, drink, or ingest whatever, and dance to any music. True hippies are evolutionaries, not revolutionaries; we will convince you with words, not weapons. We believe passionately in democracy and free enterprise (not capitalism). We will not go to war for peace; we will love th world into it, talk people into it, or shame them into it. Some people may think we are a joke; they may think we are naive, or that we are unrealisitc, but we have high ideals. Some may think we have ulterior motives, some agenda to make ourselves rich and take over the world, but that is only their value system speaking; we have no other reason for our actions than to see peace, prosperity, and love for all. That will be our reward. We are everywhere, and some day, if the world wises up, it will listen to us. September 11, 2001, would never have happened if people had listened 30 years ago.

Until now, I resisted being called “a hippie”. But if this is what it was all about, then include me.