The Failure Of The Hippie Movement

Hippies are good representation of the counter culture movement, it usually involve drug abuse, sex and abortion. History professor Theodore Roszak points out the hippies and radical students have a same point, which is counter-culture. (Roszak, 1995) In his views, counter-cultural movement is all social protest movements in the United States, such as democracy movement, women's liberation movement, black civil rights movement, and anti-war movement.

Oliver Sack is a doctor and a great writer, Sack wrote many books during his lifetime. An Anthropologist on Mars was written by him, this book consisting of few medical cases, these cases are all about different with their own experience and how they handle their disease or other medical issues. The most interesting case for me of this book is “The Last Hippie”.

An dispute which inflated hippie’s opinions was also the barbarities of the Vietnam War, which hippies powerfully opposed. Hippies particularly opposed the draft into the Vietnam War, believing that war was wrong and that blameless American men and even boys should not be required to combat if doing so was against their ethical values. The copious effort of campaigners such as Martin Luther King Junior also urged the hippie effort because it enthused people to offer their opinion in what they believed in and be welcome to express their ethical and moral values and be who they are. Furthermore, many say that the hippie movement was influenced by the murder of John F. Kennedy, a respected president whose passing powered the political and social turbulence of the

Hippies represent the ideological, naive nature that children possess. They feel that with a little love and conectedness, peace and equality will abound. It is with this assumption that so many activists and reformers, inspired by the transformation that hippies cultivated, have found the will to persist in revolutionizing social and political policy. Their alternative lifestyles and radical beleifs were the shocking blow that American culture-- segregation, McCarthyism, unjust wars, censorship--needed to prove that some Americans still had the common sense to care for one another. The young people of the sixties counterculture movement were successful at awakening awareness on many causes that are being fought in modern

The whole hippie culture all together was totally against social norms, what society wanted to see, how everyone else lived, and what they believed in. The hippie culture’s main moto was “make love, not war”. They were strongly against war and the Vietnam War, which was going on during the same time the hippie culture was popular. They thought that everyone should have acceptance of the universe. They wanted to see change in the world, global

The 1960s Hippie movement was a major point in the American history. In the 1960s a certain class of young people associated their lifestyles with the ideas of freedom, peace, and love. Hippies acted against white upper middle class lifestyle because they thought it was based on the wrong ideology. Hippies were against consumerism and American suburban life of the late 1950s and early 1960s was embodied in itself the idea of consumerism. Hippies, on the other hand, felt better about communal life with equal distribution of social goods. Traditional “bigger share” and consumerist greed as concepts of American society were despised by Hippies.

The anti-war protests of the 1960s was a response of resentment by minorities and young educated college students against the nation’s desire to participate in war against Communism in Vietnam and conduct a military draft. The protests, originally began with peaceful public demonstrations by activists, who were nonviolent; however, the peaceful demonstrators were frequently attacked and victimized by the police and other citizens, who did not share their same opinion. Throughout the peaceful protests the activists suffered many beatings in the hands of the police and as a result, many of the activists claimed the right of self-defense and turned to taking offensive actions against their oppressors including the police and other citizens. Later, the scene of violence and mayhem quickly shifted to college campuses, to which college students began protesting the draft (Gurr, 1989, pp. 183-185). At the time the average age of an American soldier serving in Vietnam was 19 and students quickly rebelled after realizing that young Americans were legally old enough to be drafted to fight and die, but were not yet legally allowed to vote or drink alcohol (UShistory, nd.).

The origins of this movement are what inspired the artists of this time, also the reason for its development. During the era of the flower child, there was impatience and strong feelings among youth. They were looking for freedom from societies expectations. The “hippie culture” took the world by storm with their community living and attraction for spirituality, religion, and sexual freedom. Haight-Ashbury was home to over 100,000 hippies, making it the universal center of the hippie movement. The music accomplished there, became the soundtrack of a lifetime. Haight-Ashbury was the center for psychedelic music because of it use of LSD.

The following research project will discuss how exactly the hippie counterculture movement believed the dominant mainstream culture was corrupt, inherently flawed and how Hippies therefore challenged these values by striving for their own utopia.

The people that would become associated with the new teenage counter-culture movement were known as the hippies. The movement began in the mid-sixties in the United States. The hippies often believed in peace and pleasure. They even ushered in a new music genre of psychedelic rock. The Grateful Dead as well as the Beatles was famous artists coming from the movement and genre. The hippies created their own communities where they criticized the mainstream society and middle class. One thing they revolutionized was sex. The sexual revolution moved from traditional ways of behaving to more promiscuous activities and pleasures. The norms of American sexual culture would change greatly. Hippies were promoters of free love in the sexual revolution. They taught that the power of sex and love should be a part of everyday teenage life. In some colleges, they started to make dorms coed; in which the males and females could come together freely. “A

‘The hippie movement germinated in San Francisco, with the Vietnam War at its core. The movement eventually spread to the East Coast as well, centralized in New York's East Village in addition to the Haight-Asbury district of San Francisco and Sunset Strip of Los Angeles” (Buchholz 858). Many hippies were angry over the conformist lifestyle that Americans were living in, and wanted to live how they wanted to live not how their employer or television wanted them to live. Hippies also took a political

Hippies- known for their love of drugs and sex, they often misguided the common folk of their intentions. In their minds, what they were doing was guilelessly standing up for themselves and what they considered was theirs; what they believed in. They believed in their rights, and they wanted to do what they pleased; not to conform to the requirements of living in the average society of the time. They wanted to create a culture where spiritual awareness was highly regarded (sometimes through psychedelic drugs), where everything was given freely, where everyone (even strangers) were thought of as one's brother, where everyone valued peace, and where rights were given freely to everyone. (Express Thyself. (n.d.)) These rights would include

From the late 1950s to the late 1970s a phenomenon erupted over the United States. A proud counter culture was born in the midst of the Vietnam War. Many people protested against the Vietnam War and the horrors that many people saw on TV because of it. Many incidents triggered the Anti-War movement and the Hippie counter culture such as the growing United States involvement in Southern Vietnam, the gruesome images that the evening news showed uncensored, the draft that caused many thousands of men to lose their lives and their minds as the end result of the war. This war triggered a great sense of what is right and wrong in specifically young people. Social justice and moral justice were some of the main focal points of the Anti-War and Hippie movements. This war allowed teenagers and young adults to have power in what they believe in and to stand up against unjust killings of our men and innocent lives in Vietnam. The eighteen-year span of the war from 1956 -1975 saw the rise and eventually the fall of the anti-war movement and the hippie movement.

The hippie subculture was originally a youth movement beginning in the United States around the early 1960s and consisted of a group of people who opposed political and social orthodoxy, choosing an ideology that favored peace, love, and personal freedom. The hippies rejected established institutions, criticized middle class values, opposed nuclear weapons and the Vietnam War, were usually eco-friendly and vegetarians, and promoted the use of psychedelic drugs. They created their own communities, listened to psychedelic rock, embraced the sexual revolution, and used drugs to explore alternative states of consciousness. They strived to liberate themselves from societal restrictions, choose their own way, and find new meaning in life.

The emergence of alternative cultures and movements during the 1960s were remarkably distinctive in which it contributed to the overall characteristics of the 1960s America. In particular, the hippie counter-culture was developed and it was popular amongst the younger Americans because they believed in peace. They wanted to live differently and wanted to be free from the mainstream society. In the film Easy Rider, it portrayed the hippie culture and at the same time, it portrayed the rejection of the culture by the Americans in the 1960s. Hippie culture and other movements alike were the reactions to the changes in society and political atmosphere in the 1960s.The film was an excellent film work that captured the characteristics of the