I was there. The hippies were spoiled kids from upper-middle class families who never had to work for anything, and hence didn't know the value of anything. They generally had a liberal arts education, and being mostly white and well fed were in general intelligent. They enjoyed the luxury of assuming a stance of moral superiority because they were well-off, protected, and pampered not only by their parents but by society in general. They could demonstrate in the streets, throw paint on statues, spit on police, all the while secure that no one would dare to lay a hand on their greasy, unkempt heads.
The only real burden any of them faced was the threat of being drafted, and they generally found ways around that threat so that they could continue unhindered their promiscuous sex and excessive drug use. They were free to break the rules of society on civility, sex and drug use because most of society abided by them, and was therefore stable and secure. It was their playpen, in which they could act out their rebellious charade without ever taking an actual risk of any kind.
As young as I was at the time, I felt complete contempt for the hippies, and my opinion of them has not changed with the passage of the decades. They turned into people such as Hillary and Bill Clinton, and Al Gore -- smug, self-righteous, arrogant shits who treat other people like peasants.
During Napster days I grabbed audio somebody uploaded of Devo playing at a college frat party when they were just starting out pre-MTV. Lead singer went into a disparaging drunk rant that the world is run by banks. "it's all the banks!" I admired him because he knew. (I had just learned about the creatures of jekyll island and sound money, being, at the time, in college myself.)
Thirty or forty odd some years after the frat party (but only a few months after I had discovered the recording) I now found Devo doing a charity event for Hillary Clinton. I cant remember what was said, but the lead singer was now disparaging Ron Paul, of all people, the man himself. The Yoda of banks and politics was now the butt of his elitist joke. And it struck me hard.
It was like the knowledgeable, truther in college, full of piss, played music, hurled political activism, was literally murdered by his wrinkly, dumb, liberal, aging self.
All that is left of Devo is a bag of fat and wrinkles.
A lot of these people never had convictions in the first place, they adopt the consensus beliefs of their peers. If they are rockers surrounded by hippies they believe all the same shit everyone else does. These days if you're a hippy rocker you have to support corporations, banks, BLM, vaccines, and you end up with Dave Grohl and Rage against the machine. They are all NPCs.
Ain't that the truth. 99.999% of the hippies/punk rockers/whatever were just posers. Eager to espouse some philosophy or ideals but in the end as fickle as the wind, and ultimately not just willing to settle but to eagerly pursue and embrace it.
You may have been there but you weren't one of them. For example, hippies and political radicals were two completely different groups of people.
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