Not Your Father’s Hippies

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                                                     NOT YOUR FATHER’S HIPPIES

Starry-eyed radicals in the 60s and 70s dreamed they were going to re-do America.  Some of their favorite mottos were, “Make Love Not War” and “Change it or Lose it.” They focused on drugs, music, class, sex, and fashion….almost everything and anything was fair game to degrade.  “Tune in or Drop Out,” represented Woodstock and all the hippies, beatniks, and radicals of the age. 

We witnessed long hair, wire-rimmed glasses…….who was a square, drag, bummer, and who was  hip, cool, groovy, mellow and far out!  Most of these crazy kids weren’t unhinged Weathermen killers or Cancel Culture Radicals with the underpinnings of communists, but just adolescents  along for the good-time ride.

With the end of the draft in 1972, the winding down of the Vietnam War, the oil embargoes, and a worsening of the economy, the ‘60s revolution withered away.  Even radical Jane Fonda was put on the back burner and lost attention.  Good riddance I say!

Historians claim that most of these kids were middle-class students with long hair…. kicking back during the period of the post-war boom, indulging their appetites and ensuring they wouldn’t end up in Vietnam.   There were really no new changes in society.  The Civil Rights movement and the equality of women and gays were already birthed before the hippies,  as were folk songs and early rock music. What the 60s kids did was not only to accelerate these trends but also try to radicalize them. 

The Yuppies of the 1980s were the natural successors of the hippies.  The kids of the 60s and 70s were narcissistic, free-for-all, do your own thing people, and represented self indulgence and wanting to avoid responsibility.   The Reagan era finished the dead-enders of the Woodstock generation.  They eventually grew up.  By the late 70s and 80s most of these same kids had gotten married, were raising a family, and were living an abundant type of life style.  They rebooted their self centered drug, sex and party impulses to fixations on money, status and material things……nice new houses and at least two cars in the drive!

This time around though, their off spring’s left-wing assault is different and far more ominous. The Woke grandchildren of the former hippies are now more ruthless and more systematic insiders.  The Woke and wired new establishment knows how to use money and power to rebirth America as something the Founders and most current Americans never envisioned.  The cancel culture generation of radicals has taken control of our society in ominous and destructive ways.  They have infiltrated every facet of our society in one way or another.  With the rise of social media there seems to be no bastion of safety. 

Name one mainline institution that the Woke left doesn’t now control.  The media? The campus? Silicon Valley? Professional sports? The corporate boardroom?  Foundations?  The K-12 educational establishment?  The military hierarchy?  The government deep state?  The FBI top echelon?  Our safety net seems to be in our Christian communities and even they are under threat if our Christian schools refuse to allow the LGBTQ+ to become faculty. 

These Woke revolutionaries aren’t pan-handlers, street people, or Grate-ful Dead groupies.  They aren’t even a few nutty and murderous Symbionese Liberation Army terrorists fighting against the “Man.” They are “the Man.”

Our 21st c. revolutionaries are multibillionaires wearing tennis shoes and T shirts, but with absolute power and desire to censor how half the country communicates—– or cancel them entirely.  They are the campus administrators who ban free speech.  They don’t picket the Pentagon…….they’re inside the Pentagon.  They don’t chant “eat the rich”. They are the rich who eat at Napa Valley’s French Laundry.

They’re guiding principle is “never let a crisis go to waste.”  Only in times of a pandemic, and volatile racial relations can the new upscale leftist revolutionaries use fear to push through policies that no one in more normal times could stomach.  These new radicals hate dissent.  They destroy any who question their media spun hoaxes.

Truth is their enemy, and fear is their weapon.  George Orwell’s “1984” predictions are coming to pass.  While this elitist leftist revolution is more dangerous and sloppy than its ‘60s predecessor, it’s also more vulnerable……..but only if Americans will finally “Wake up to “Woke” and say to their madness……….enough is enough!