Letters to the Editor
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"Bong"? A quibble, and more ...
Bongs were not a '60s artifact; they became popular in the mid-70s...'60s dope smoking was overwhelmingly joints, with some cheap tobacco-pipes and a few hookahs thrown in.
A small snipe, for which I apologise, but it just goes to show how easy it is to conflate time-periods (see: buckled shoes on the Pilgrims---they looked "old-fashioned" to 19th Century artists and viewers, but didn't come in until about a century after Plymouth Rock). And if it's that easy to get literally material facts wrong, how easy is it to get the mood wrong?
That may be part of the point: the '60s now exist in peoples' minds, and as such can easily be changed to suit the needs of the day; it's almost as if he who controlled the past controlled the present....
Myself, I: 1.) Lived with a woman for years before marrying her, 2.) Have smoked marijuana a little* in a relatively safe place for it and benefitted thereby when listening to music, doing partial differential equations, and making love, 3.) believe that there's nothing inherently good about toil or suffering, and 3.) greatly enjoy good bread. I owe the counter-culture those.
The "hippies", loosely construed (as the term must be) had it wrong only in their timing. If we don't breed or bomb or infect ourselves out of advanced existence, there will come a day when it should be possible for there to be very few limits (something like Iain M. Banks' "Culture", though less grandiose), at which point it will probably be necessary to wrest ourselves out of the grip of those who enjoy the rest of us' being limited.
This semitopia will come out of the Enlightenment, which the hippies in their Romanticism scorned (to their discredit), but their small-'l' libertarian and hedonic impulses will inform it...if we can pull it off. "We": there's no Justice, just us. Hunter Thompson said it best: the great delusion of the counter-culture was that someone else was off somewhere tending the light at the end of the tunnel.
*mostly not in bongs, they were designed for opium and get too hot
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Hippie Haters and Boomer Haters
You know, the sixties (which ended in 1975 by my calendar) are still with us. All the hippie-haters and Boomer-haters really hate, not the past, but the present. And us old hippies are used to being hated. Nothing has changed. Even the same old conservative ruling class is still in power.
Marijuana? There is more BC Bud coming across the border now than there ever was at that time.
Communes? As one poster noted, who lived in communes in the 90s, there were more communes formed recently than in the 60s-70s.
Organic food? Can you say Whole Foods. Local, vegan, organic, cage free, you name it, pick a restaurant near you.
Environmentalism and Earth Day? The environmental hippies at my local Utility have hundreds of windmills turning on Buffalo Ridge in Minnesota/Iowa. The hippies at UPS have their roofs covered with solar panels.
Anti-War? Ah, well, the anti-war movement is alive and well, and even in the unions. It grew faster than in the 60s. It is worldwide. And even the Demo candidates have to pretend they agree. Go to a Demo and you see the old hippies and the young hippies. The protests at Seattle against the World Bank and the IMF in 1999 were organized by young 'hippies.'
Jam Music? Well, the Dead and the Allmans begot Phish, and Phish begot My Morning Jacket and dozens of other bands. Woodstock begot Coachella and Bonnaroo. There are now many outdoor festivals all over the country, far more than in the 60s, and they have been running for years. The Winnipeg Folk Festival has been going for more than 40 years.
Women's and gay rights? Well, Obama just announced he might tank 'don't ask, don't tell' in the military. Women's rights is taking on new meaning all over the world against Mormon, Christian, Islamic, Buddhist and Hindu fundamentalism. Even the conservative state of Texas felt moved to protect the female children of the Mormon fundamentalist sect, and protect those children against incest, child abuse and rape. More peoople live together now instead of geting married than in the 60s.
Again, I could go on, but the hippie-haters and Boomer-haters only reveal their own conservatism and ignorance of history. The 'boomers' like me grew up on the stories of World War II and the depression, and we respected our parents, who lived through those events. There is no way we didn't respect them, as THEY WERE OUR PARENTS. And they grew up on the experiences of their parents, fresh out of World War I, the Bolshevik revolution, and immigration. It is a long historical chain, and it is still going on. Don't hate the people before you, learn from them, and go on.
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We're surrounded by the fruits of the 60s
My fourth grandchild was born yesterday. As I walked out of the "birthing center", past the nursery, I noticed that there were no babies - not a one - in there. They were all with their families in individual, comfortable "birthing rooms." When my first child was born 40 years ago, fathers were not even allowed in the delivery room. That is but one small piece of evidence of the changes brought about directly by the social consciousness of people in the "counter culture" that came of age in the 60s.
Medical marijuana, same sex marriage, organic food, to a lesser degree the civil rights movement and the politics of inclusion and tolerance... these and many other societal changes that many people - including these historians apparently - now take for granted, had their genesis in the alternative culture movements that sprang up in the 60s.
To reduce the evidence of the changes wrought by the hundreds of thousands of committed 60s activists to mere pot smoking and wild sex is to call into question one's observational skills. Or perhaps it's just misplaced, long buried jealousy on the part of these historians. Maybe they just didn't have access to the good stuff.
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Not all or nothing
To say the counter-culture of the 1960s didn't change anything is absurd. Because of the counter-culture, the United States got rid of the draft, the voting age was lowered to 18 and, perhaps most importantly, women now have far more options in their lives when it comes to jobs, families and their bodies.
Nothing is black and white, and the '60s counter-culture certainly had its failings. I've always found people who were part of it to be self-righteous and a tad delusional.
But then, don't we all romanticize our youth to a degree, regardless of when we grew up?