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What Killed the “Flower Power”?
Posted on October 24th, 2009 2 comments
The late sixties and early seventies were magical times. I was born in 1956 so I was still very young, but I had a chance to partake in the seventies as a youth. The age and the hippie movement were something very refreshing and new. It came as a synthesis of art (music), philosophy and a lifestyle that rejected all the robotic, mindless corporate culture that sadly got us where we are today.
We had great movies that came out over the course of these 20 years. “One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest”, an adaptation of the 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey, just to name a personal favorite. We had a promising new age that rejected materialistic aims, sought (and found) spirituality and basically enjoyed life through the arts and love. This sounds easy, doesn’t it?
The problem came of course in the beginning via using recreational drugs.
Mind expansion is a novel concept and using “herbs” and magic mushrooms were customarily used by shamans, who took the dangers upon themselves in order to gain insight and possibly serve their communities better. It was not a free for all.
Of course it was impossible to even attempt to explain this to the selfish and overly liberal mind of the flower children of that age.
Drugs are dangerous, and can be a novel experiment in the beginning but they are highly addictive, unhealthy and destructive regardless of the kind of substance you wish to try. Through daily meditation and active serving, the community a person can enjoy is the same “mind expansion” clean and free of the aftereffect of a legal or illegal substance.
The same goes for sex. While it is part of life, and vehicle of procreation, free sex is not the same as free love. Tantric sex is the other mind expanding vehicle that was embraced through the sixties and seventies. While I KNOW I will sound prudish, sex, especially promiscuous and unprotected sex is not mind expanding nor is it spiritual.
I know for a fact that while all this appears to be a coincidence, this is not. The age of the anti war, anti establishment movement that I prefer to call Flower Power, scared the powers that be to their core. These “dark forces” that we must fight all the time, looked at the trend of the Hippie movement using LSD and openly advocating destructive behaviors and at that point they knew that their battle had been won. The movement had no chance from that point on. As the cliché goes, “sex and drugs killed the anti-war, hippie movement”. The war continued on and ultimately was lost, the young Republicans eventually ventured back to their college campuses and the new selfish, materialistic eighties came storming in.
Everything comes and goes in cycles. The pendulum swung back but this does not mean that all is lost. Those twenty years gave us plenty to learn from and such great music and art came from this era.
Having said this, where is the outrage of our new war in Afghanistan? What about the mass protests against war on the middle class? Where are the mass protests of the wholesale theft in Washington? I wish we had the ounce of the gumption and zeal TODAY that the Vietnam War protesters once had. Would we have more outrage if the US army were not a voluntary fighting force? What would happen if the powers that be re-instated the draft? Protesting out of self-interest is wrong. The war in Afghanistan is not winnable; it clearly lacks goals and purpose. No nation has ever defeated these people. The US will not be the exemption. Better dust off those old history books…
2 responses to “What Killed the “Flower Power”?”
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Complacency is the reason that we, like lemmings or sheep go along with our Government and Big Business today…
Peace, Jill (ex flower child)
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EN Heim October 31st, 2009 at 00:50
I was born in the 30s. I lived through WW2, Korea, Vietnam and now the present wars, plus all the little conflicts in between. I remember people rejoicing over the declaration of war by President Roosevelt, because it ended the Depression. That was understandable.
In the 50s, when I became a man, I experienced my first sub-culture, the Beatniks. This was the attempt to bring back a meaningful life to the populace. It failed because it had no direction and no order or structure. It led to the Hippies of the 60s and 70s. That too failed because of no order; it was a random chaotic free-for-all leading to abuses.
During the 70s, I worked at UCLA. I worked in Publications. I did the medical magazines that came out of the Medical and Dental Schools. During this period, there was a flock of to-be doctors hoping to go into community services and do good for the poor, one of them became the Free Clinic. I remember these doctors hoping to rectify the social order. As time went by, this order dwindled like so many honorable attempts at a humanitarian cause.
What happened? There was no order, no universal structure to the plan, and no leader. All philosophies that have succeeded, whether good or bad, were because there was a direction, a purpose, and a strong leader—the reason WW2 was a success. No matter how good or bad they were, they succeeded.
It has nothing to do with money. It has nothing to do altruism. It has something to do with a strong leader, a strong purpose, and a strong structure.
The reason why the US is failing today is because there hasn’t been a strong purpose, structure or leader. I believe this all must begin in the family. I see so many communities where children grown up aimlessly. There is no hope for them. What I see, and have experienced before, education is good, but there must be a job at the end of the gauntlet — at least a job that has meaning — not just to put money in the boss’s pocket. And I see these kids today saying, what good is an education if there’s no job,especially, when crime pay more. As one gal told me, if I fail at medical school, I’ll go into drugs.
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Jill October 26th, 2009 at 08:52