More of my interview with Zoe on the "hippies."

Recent readers will recall my interview with my youngest daughter Zoe, who is doing a research paper on the hippie counterculture of the Sixties and Seventies. She had some follow-up questions which I answered as follows:

From what years did you live and interact with hippies?

From 1967 through 1974. The movement had pretty much sputtered out by then.

What did you think about them?

They were mostly amiable grasshoppers who were fundamentally unserious about life, politics and full of delusions about hedonistic lifestyle choices being a basis for any type of a sane way of life. Sex was no substitute for a loving relationship. Funny how the Old Testament was right about monogamy.

What were your opinions of the lifestyle and behavior?

See original responses and the above. I suppose someone would say that my skeptical mild distaste (later to harden to general detestation) of the lifestyle which was the raison d'etre of the hippies was reflective of my bourgeouis, middle-class upbringing. So what? The "expanded consciousness" of the hippies led to overdoses, STDs and generally unhappy, unfulfilled lives. My "middle-class upbringing" still allowed me to discern the differences between reality, social horseshit & wishful thinking.

Did you participate in any aspects of the behavior associated with the hippie movement?

Smoked some weed, dropped a little acid and mescaline, dated a girl who was convinced that sex was a substitute for love and that drug use was the key to "cosmic consciousness." Also, I paid their part of the bills in the house when they had blown theirs on dope. Does that count?

What were the 60s like? Politically, socially.

A time of great upheaval when everything was being questioned and many wrong answers were being offered by designing people with an angle who should have known better (and often did).

Which events from the 1960s stand out to you the most? (assassinations, other extreme movements, etc.)

I still recall vividly where I was in each instance when JFK, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated. The riots at the 1968 Democratic Party convention in Chicago remain vivid because I was there, accidentally, as my family chose that week to visit the Museum of Natural History that week. It was the first time I caught a whiff of tear gas and the first time I saw a bunch of cops chase down -- and beat down -- an unarmed long-haired man for no discernible reason. It would not be the last. I was sixteen at the time. That experience -- and watching the TV coverage at night of crowds chanting "The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!" -- made quite an impression. There was a general feeling that change, if not revolution, was in the air. It was exciting. It was awful. But there is no doubt in my mind that I would be a different person today if I had not experienced it.

There was one other interaction with the hippies -- my first -- which I neglected to mention. In 1967, I ran away from my home in Marion, Ohio to New York City. I got there by buying a bus ticket on Greyhound with my coin collection. I went straight to East Village, the hippie mecca at the time, where I spent one night in a hippie "free hostel" or flop house. I got no sleep because of people asking me if I had any dope and one particularly aggressive homosexual who wanted to screw me. I declined the offer and spent the next few nights trying to be anonymous, sleeping in the Port Authority Bus Terminal, until I ran out of money. At that point a Jewish hot dog vendor outside the UN loaned me a dime and counseled me to call home (yes, at that time you could call from a payphone for a thin dime) and get my ass out of New York -- which by that time I was quite ready to do. My parents wired me the return bus fare plus a little expense money by Western Union and I ate the first decent meal in a week in an Italian restaurant near the terminal. I returned home on Greyhound, the way I came, having spent a part of my expense money on posters of Mao Tse-Tung and Che Guevara. (The hippies weren't the only ones with severe misconceptions in those days.)