----The Flower Child----

"Voice"    Parchment Background    Contact    About INTS      ID 483 Hip~ Sept 13 2006

If only the world could be the way a hippy sees it.

The Flower Child
Is Free to Love the World and all it’s Vistas
Is Neither Girl nor Boy but All
Does Not see Authority beyond Virtue 
Knows not race, creed or color,
a child of the Universe.

The Hippy Philosophy is the essence of Ecumenity. Apolitical, totally non-partisan, represents no race short of the "Human race", represents no commercial interests short of trinkets and offs, began the free love movement, long hair, anti-war, ban the bomb, peace sign, pot and acid, Greenpeace, practical clothing, sister/brotherhood of all.

The hip generation didn’t begin with the hippies, rather it was a follow up to the beat generation and rightly so because North American society was the only one that could afford such juvenile fads. Times were getting fat, Detroit sound was the result of so many kids having too much free time, since their dads had good work in the car factories. The Beatniks were the first rebellious youth movement of that era, famous for their heel tapping, finger snapping, freely spouting prose or poetry in an impromptu performance centered around the coffeehouse’s proliferating everywhere in US and Canada, called imaginary names like the Forth Dimension and struggling to survive.

The Beat generation wasn’t so named because the kids felt "beat" by the society they lived in, as reported by some writers on the subject. They weren’t named by a subsequent generation. They lived the "beat", referring to music, because of their age and inclination to get more involved in a distinct group separate from the rest of society. The term beatnik was embraced by them almost immediately, just as the hip generation that followed became "hippy".

The Beatniks were just playing at dropping out of society. It took the hippies to actually do it. Tune in, turn on and drop out, translated into beatnik was "get with it, go man go!" but the reference to drugs just wasn’t there. The hippies had good reason to get stoned. The world they lived in was exploding more than 300 nuclear tests, all considerably larger than the Nagasaki/Hiroshima bombs that had gone off almost to the day that most of the hippies were born. The beats had seen this trauma but were convinced by their parents that the war was good, whereas the hippies felt it in their bones and knew that society was heading down a rotten path and some new standard was needed. The beats had short hair and youthful, artistic, tight-fitting clothing, showing some independence from their elders but the hip generation wanted to be completely different. Long hair meant "No" to armed forces enlistment or police training. The clothing and beads were an anti-uniform and all the beats did was pave the way for a sub-culture to exist.

End of Session One.

Question: Try to explain why the Hippy generation failed to have more apparent influence on the society that followed.