Flower Power Failures

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There is something I don’t understand – seems there’s a meme lately to blame hippies for the current financial and social state of the world. Obviously, folks today are no different than they were 4 decades ago. Understanding is severely lacking.

Understanding, not in the way your mom says it, but in the way Webster defined it.

I was there. I remember. Let me tell you about it.

There was a huge movement back in the 60s and 70s known as Flower Power. You know: the tie-dyed guys and girls, the insanely flared Bell-bottomed jeans and of course, the ubiquitous flower in the hair.

These folks were not hippies! They were Flower Children.

If you’re gonna criticize the past, it behooves you to know something about it.

There were literally millions of these Flower Children. You could find them in the big cities and even in the backwoods schools of the South. I graduated high school (1976) in a class of 41. There were many flower children there as well. But there was only one hippie.

And that’s the point I’m trying to briefly make here – there simply were not that many hippies. Usually, folks who bash hippies like to bring up Woodstock, where supposedly over a quarter-million hippies gathered in one place.

Hard Work Created This

Woodstock was organized for the flower children, folks.

There were some hippies there to be sure, but nearly all of them were on or behind the stage. Hendrix? Hippie. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young? Hippies. Members of Jefferson Airplane? Hippies. Country Joe? Redneck hippie.

But those guys you see frolicking in the mud? Flower children, every one. They were there to be served the fruits of the hippies’ work.

Yeah, the hippies’ WORK. Hippies aren’t lazy. Hippies do not mooch. Hippies exert. Hippies create.

And above all else, hippies endeavor to understand… everything. That’s what it means – to be Hip. To understand. Because through understanding we are certain of our present, empowered for the future, for all our benefit.

Not so easy to attain, this understanding. But to a hippie, there is no other goal worth spending a life on. Hippies know this means hard work, study, discourse, and more hard work. That’s why there were(are) so few hippies.

Few folks ever born develop the mettle required to be a hippie. Most who try, fail, being drawn away by the drugs or the look or whatever ego-flattering thing they find on their way. Nothing wrong with that – it’s as it should be, as it ever was.

But when those failures grow older, take control of your governments and (financial)industries and chunk a yoke around your neck, try to remember one thing.

It’s not us hippies who are doing it to you. It’s flower power failures.