Leslie’s Blog

 

I will do a series of posts titled “hippie”. They will be a work in Progress.

A number of things have been bringing me to write about the subject, and if I don’t get started, in little bits and pieces, I might not tackle the project at all. What a long strange trip this has been, and I may be getting tired…

One of the things that has behaved as a catalyst for writing this series is being personally mocked as a “hippie” one too many times. I don’t mind being called  a hippie, but I don’t like being mocked  as one, or  having the title “hippie” mocked as something derogatory. And don’t say dirty and hippie together as one concept. I’ll be only too glad to tell you something about Dirt…

I have long resented the theft of the hippie identity, and its being made into something beneath contempt, for the purposes of alienating people in general from absorbing and learning, by hippie example, the common good sense of not killing the only planet we have.

Another thing acting as a catalyst, is an article I read in Time magazine, September 17, 2007 issue, in the Environment section, titled “Green Acres”, about present day EcoVillages.

I began reading the article with interest, and then just a little growing annoyance at the tone, developing into full blown catalytic heat at the point where the article says, …”Americans have sought out companies of like minded souls since the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, organizing around religion, politics, philosophy and –by the time the 1960’s rolled around–long hair, free love and poor hygiene.   But today that need for community is paired with a desire to live in harmony with the environment.”

The implication of the Time magazine article  seemed to me as if what I believed in was only about having the freedom to not wash.  And that now  everyone was, finally,  living in harmony with nature.

Did I read that wrong? Any hippies out there reading this want to help me out? Have I inhaled one too many times, and just don’t get it? 

Whereas I am delighted that people are willing to embrace a more planet friendly attitude, I am suspicious that this will be a last gasp attempt at a “fad” of the “ecological” kind, and then it will become passe, and “so very early 2007-ish”.

My hippie life started many years before the 70’s.  Hippie has been my personal philosophy all my life, even before I knew that there would one day be a name for what I felt.  It’s not even close to being about drugs, and sex, bad hygiene, or “doing your own thing”, as hippie has been so wrongly portrayed.

I don’t think I’m alone in my hippie-ness. I meet more and more people all the time that are admitting their love of animals, nature, the earth.  You know, “tree-huggers”.  They realize that we are in a closed system that seriously needs our immediate attention and, dare I say it, LOVE.  

Heck. There’s enough of us now, we could even start a Movement.

I have never abandoned my hippie ideals. I can’t. They are who I am. I have made compromises that I have had to learn to live with. I have rationales out the wazoo. You may learn from what I did. You may embrace all or parts of what I learned. You may dismiss all.

But please don’t be disrespectful and mocking of a concept and mindset that may well be one we all  have to adopt in the very near future…

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hippie…part one

From what I’ve said so far, most folks can figure out that I like nature.  Untrammeled nature.

The word Progress, in it’s industrial strength meaning, is the worst curse word I can think of.

As a kid, when Progress was mentioned, I could never figure out what we were Progressing towards.

Bulldoze the woods behind the house for Progress. Bulldoze the trees and pheasants and rabbits and red cardinals and blackberries and the leafy black topsoil into huge piles at the end edge of the subsoil scar, for Progress. Build a warehouse there, for the plastics factory, for Progress.

For months after the topsoil was pushed into heaps, a few reverent people would visit the corpse pile, and fill their car trunks with the black gold that is the only black gold. They would say, as my dirt was being shovelled away, “This is great dirt. It will grow anything”. Yeah, I thought to myself, it used to grow trees.

Pour fluorescent green ‘waste’ into the babbling brook in the remaining woods, so that it stunk, and died, for Progress. Cover over the ponds that had been there, tucked away secretly, across the cornfield, waiting for a still wind hard freeze that made ice skating a joy.  Build a warehouse instead. Now we’re making Progress.

Dispose of the plastic bits and liquids in the duck pond next to the factory, so that the mallards and turtles and frogs, and dragonflies can have Progress.

I asked my parents about Progress. Why were they doing this to my woods? My trees? My ponds?

“Progress, honey. It’s called Progress”, was what I was told. 

I was never given a reasonable explanation. I felt on some level my parents sense of resolve, and being steeled to the fact that Progress was necessary. But I never felt that anyone had sufficient outrage.  I had sufficient outrage, but I wasn’t even ten years old yet.

 Now I have a grown up understanding of Progress.  And I have not lost my sufficient outrage.

Leslie

R. Crumb

A Short History of America by R. Crumb

Mr. Natural

voodoolinks:  Earth Day

                             Dirt

                             Dirty Money