They criticize the government's restrictions on citizens' rights and interests, they hate the greed of big companies, lament the narrowness of traditional morality and oppose the inhumanity of war. But there is nothing they can do. They can only make their cries in their peaceful movements and parades; They can only put flowers in their hair or send flowers to pedestrians, "put flowers in barrels"; They can only express their dissatisfaction with wandering rock music and sad music.
Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the Vietnam War, the human landing on the moon, and Khrushchev's threat to destroy the United States ... The 1960s of the United States are doomed to be a complex, profound, serious and confused era. The great richness of material life and the constant emergence of life problems have made American youth gradually lose themselves in the boredom of life and the increasing sense of social responsibility. They vaguely feel life and love, they vaguely touch their ideals and future, but the interweaving of happiness and pain, the conflict between ideal and reality, the dislocation of ability and goal, and the contradiction between their own pursuit and social requirements finally make their beliefs collapse. Under the catalysis of rock music, young people began to integrate these double contradictions, and finally formed the most representative cultural phenomenon of that era-a completely spontaneous and pure spiritual movement-hippie movement. The collection of confusion and ideals-hippies were finally born. American youth began to think independently, a real rebellion; They created their own living space ... Today, people still like to use the words "innocence, wonderful and great" to describe the 1960s, not only to recall the distant past, but also because of the return of a feeling.
There are many reasons, but the Vietnam War eventually became the fuse of the hippie movement. During the war, thousands of young Americans were sent to the front to charge, kill, bleed and die ... The Vietnam War, which violated public opinion, caused great reflection among young people. Wave after wave of anti-war demonstrations broke out on campuses all over the United States. Shortly thereafter, a series of incidents in which the National Guard shot and killed the students in the demonstration undoubtedly added fuel to the fire. The hippie movement finally escalated in the summer of 1967 named love, and "Love not war" became the most appealing hippie slogan. Hippies have grown up and shouted this summer.
What is a hippie? Hippies are not young people with long hair, hippies are not young people dressed as hippies, and they are not advocates of ecstasy and sexual liberation! That's not the real face of hippies. Although some people take a lot of drugs to escape from reality and start to go crazy-it's just a vent of anguish! Not their original intention. Real hippies absolutely reject violence. They just passively create their own paradise and fight against the established values of society with pure spirit under the thought of "love and peace". Miss the simple and primitive social life, seek spiritual belonging in utopia, insert flowers symbolizing love and peace in your head, advocate the essence of pure spirit, love life and nature, and be kind to others-this is the true face of hippies!
But many people misunderstand and even deliberately vilify it. Arms dealers who supported the Vietnam War, government officials who suppressed freedom, traditional religious believers, people who lost themselves under repression, dumb people who acted as singers for the government, blind people who saw the so-called light, deaf people who heard the holy voice … are afraid of these young people! They are afraid, afraid of the awakening of these young people's self-awareness, afraid of these young people's resistance to tradition, afraid of these young people's subversion of their rule! So they do everything possible to attack, vilify and divide these young people who seek self-redemption. "Hippies take drugs", "Hippies are homosexuals", "Hippies are just a group of social scum" and "Hippies oppose progress" ... All kinds of evils come to them-as long as hippies have problems, the defenders of order can turn them into more unforgivable crimes than the original sin. And some boring punk children, in the name of hippies, are doing things that are completely contrary to the spirit of hippies. They have no sense of social responsibility and influence and will only tarnish their reputation. After the appearance of punk rock, light rock music with psychedelic colors and hymns of love and life were replaced by hysterical growls and meaningless screams. In our time, how many people can really understand the hippie spirit?
No, the government does not allow hippies to get positive comments in order to maintain its rule; For the glory of the traditional order, religious believers prefer hippies to be reviled from generation to generation; Arms dealers hope that there will be no more anti-war demonstrations for money! So they seize any problem of hippies and exaggerate it infinitely-a group of drug addicts, independent activists and social scum. On the one hand, they constantly suppress hippies and use the most evil method-selling drugs to hippies to make them degenerate. Through the means of education, hippies are kept away from the edge of society and the crowd, forcing hippies to yield. They succeeded. In the eyes of orthodox people, hippies mean danger, deviance, depravity, filth and ugliness. Hippies-people who are unwilling to participate in social activities and lack social responsibility and health awareness; A trite, boring or annoying person. This is what they give to hippies! The successor of the old hippie, the hippie in the new century, has forgotten his own goal, his own name "Son of Flowers", his own mission, his own manifesto and lost himself in the tower built by the government, religion, others and himself! Reduce yourself to punk character and become a social scum. Time, you are insulting a great era. When John Lennon fell under the guns of fanatical soldiers, when the "son of flowers" was buried by overwhelming material desires, when punk rock finally covered up the singing of Imagination, and when these young people were still confused and depressed in sports, their departure became inevitable.
In the 1960s, they held protests and demonstrations almost every day. Racism, poverty, women's rights and other issues are often condemned by hippies. After the intervention of music and Vietnam War, with the participation of protest singers such as joan baez, Bob Dylan and arlo guthrie, music quickly spread hippie ideas with its popularity, especially Bob Dylan, which led the internal thinking of American rock and roll across the sixties and seventies. Until today, his existence still plays an important role in the field of ideological connotation, but his influence is the biggest and decisive. In the middle and late 1960s, the super-large-scale outdoor music performance created the most glorious period of the hippie movement. Simple thoughts, love, peace, sexual openness, psychedelic drugs, anti-war voices and hundreds of thousands of hippies appear on the stage. All the chaos, madness and filth are noble under the great simple feelings of hippies.
Glory is short-lived, and it may be so. 1969 after the peak of Woodstock Music Festival, the hippie movement gradually began to decline, under the opposition of the government, under the traditional contempt, and in the self-indulgence of insiders.
The 1980s was the age when hippies collapsed. During Reagan's administration, the United States repeatedly won various competitions with the former Soviet Union. The great sense of superiority brought by economic development made people accustomed to thinking from a personal perspective, while the hippie movement always relied on collective strength. This ideological change from "our generation" to "my generation" finally made hippies lose the premise of existence. At this stage, what attracts the attention of young people of "my generation" is actually "racism" that hippies despised before. The rise of the Ku Klux Klan and the expansion of white supremacy became the means to flaunt the avant-garde-the banner of "love and peace" was thrown into the sewer. The slogan "back to the prehistoric" escaped from this society, got rid of all kinds of connections with the real society and the real cultural model, and was thrown into the historical torrent in the confidence and blindness of social development.
Today, there are no real hippies in America; In China, adults never want hippies. Under the uglification of governments in various countries, addicts, maverick and social scum have become the image judgments of ordinary people.
Hippies often participate in peace movements, including demonstrations against the Vietnam War and demonstrations for human rights. The Youth International Party is a small group of hippies who are particularly active in politics.
From the perspective of 2005, hippies are quite sexist, but in fact, hippies quickly accepted the principles of feminism and egalitarianism.
At first, hippies were not very tolerant of homosexuality, but with the development of the movement, they accepted homosexuality more and more.
Hippies also express their political demands by "falling out" with society and realize the changes they seek. Back in the countryside, cooperative enterprises, alternative energy, freedom of the press movement and organic agriculture were all favored at the beginning of the hippie movement.