Just got to wondering...whatever happened to the Age of Aquarius?
The whole Hippy-Love-Peace-Thing was a world-wide phenomena that took place before Social Media, before cell phones or Zuckerborg, or TicTock. We were intent on saving the world from destruction and we were going to do it with Love and a good amount of marijuana and other mind-altering substances.
It might be nice if today's young folk could promote harmony and understanding, love and peace....
Perhaps Woodstock was the beginning of the end of the Age of Aquarius.
6 comments:
Well, it was a nice thought.
Hippies were killed by disco. Despite Gloria Gaynor's song, there were no survivors.
Your post touches on some thoughts I've thought of blogging about myself. I may or may not get around to it - reviewing and rehashing the last fifty+ years is a tall order - but here's an excerpt from a 1991 PBS documentary about the hippies that is highly relevant: https://youtu.be/vm6DvlZ2O20.
I will say, though, that the whole peace-love-hippie thing was something I was just a bit too young for, and never was part of. I was still in high school when Woodstock and Kent State happened. Just a couple of years later, a college professor told my class "You guys just missed it - the whole wave of the sixties," and we knew what he meant.
Another instructor asked us one day to define a "hippie." (He was one of those teachers who always ask interesting questions that really make you think.) And in the ensuing class discussion, we all agreed that by then there was no meaning to the word anymore. Long hair, bell bottoms, etc., etc., were all so commonplace that the word was obsolete already.
And so it goes - today's fads are tomorrow's junk. But the sixties did in some ways spark social changes. Not all of them good. I'm too old and tired to write about all that just now, though.
Sorry, but you are wrong...I HAVE SURVIVED! Disco only ENERGIZED this old hippy and brought out the gayness that hippiness denied him. Always a hippy at heart.
Thank for the thoughtful response. I was older, so I was one...sometimes in the middle of it all, sometimes on the periphery. Yes, there were "fads" associated with hippies and the peace movement and the musicians, but I think hippie was more than a fad...it was, to appropriate a phrase, almost a "deeply held religious belief".
The clip I linked to above makes that same point in a roundabout way. It must have given you a powerful sense of identity and belonging. I moved in the opposite direction - into a very fundamentalist religion which did the same for me, for a while. With the perspective that old age brings, I'm sure we could have a fascinating discussion about the era from our different vantage points if only we were groovy enough to Zoomify ourselves - haha.
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