Happy birthday, hippie-America! Soon will be the fortieth anniversary of the legendary Summer of Love. Of course, Haight-Ashbury was only the most sensational focus of a larger something emerging, what is now called “the counterculture.” It is, I think, a four-decade-old ethnicity born by non-traditional means. And it has much to celebrate.

Powerful forces in America see hippie culture as the enemy within, a harbinger of the end of Western Civilization; they hate the counterculture and believe it has no place in modern America. Remember Secretary of the Interior James Watt trying to ban the Beach Boys from the national July 4th celebration? To survive in such a hostile, repressive atmosphere is an accomplishment in itself.

But we’ve more than survived: we’re thriving. Look around you; judging by appearance alone, you’ll see hippie types almost everywhere. In the recent PBS series Country Boys, one of the subjects is a twenty-something self-described “hippie” living in Appalachia. No, it’s not Haight-Ashbury;no, it’s not the sixties, but there he is. Also, hippie types tend to have countercultural kids. So look again: you’ll see teens bearing signs of hippie culture--say, tie-dyed tees and hemp jewelry--and you‘ll soon realize that when the sixties ended, probably a majority of today’s hippies had yet to be born.

Entire states like Vermont have reputations as being countercultural; most states have identifiable hippie enclaves; California is crowded with them. Today, I’d estimate that roughly ten percent of America is hippie, maybe more. And that clichè about hippies being just a thing of the sixties, it’s not descriptive; it’s proscriptive: it tells us not what is but what hippie-haters think should be.

Bigots find this vitality alarming since they see us as, among other negative things, poster children for drug abuse, a menace to youth. But hippie-as-helpless-drug-addict is a stereotype. Some use drugs responsibly; some eschew them entirely. The counterculture didn’t invent drug abuse; it didn’t lose Vietnam for America; it’s not the mother of all immorality. If for a moment we might stop blaming hippies for all things bad, we would see what a blessing hippiedom has been.

Can you say, “personal computer”? I’m not saying Bill Gates is a hippie, but most of the PC pioneers were. As Time put it, “We Owe It All To the Hippies . . . The real legacy of the sixties generation is the computer revolution.” Where would the world be without the PC? Kudos to the counterculture.

Can you say, “natural/organic food”? They have countercultural roots; the seeds we planted have grown. At first, we were ridiculed: “What Tastes Terrible . . . ?” the Wall St. Journal once asked, comparing granola to horse food. Yet in 2003, that same paper hailed natural/organics as one of the strongest sectors in the American grocery market. Today, we can see the impact everywhere: even Wonder Bread has a whole-grain product; even MacDonald’s has vegetarian items and a “healthy” salad bar; even Rush Limbaugh probably eats an occasional granola bar. Because hippies have fought for a healthier diet, the average American will likely live longer.

Hippie health innovations didn’t stop with food. Say “alternative medicine.” Yes, some of it’s likely quackery, but a lot isn’t. Much of what the nation now accepts as potentially beneficial in health care--yoga, meditation, modern midwifery, more-holistic approaches to healing, probably even the greater use of vitamins--has come through the conduit of the counterculture. As healers, hippies have done great good.

Heck, we’ve wanted to heal the whole planet, and that’s meant an emphasis on the environment. The average American, towing a recycling bin to the curb, often forgets recycling’s hippie roots; today, counterculturists lead the way in earth-friendly building and often in technology, such as the burgeoning bio-diesel industry. Bigots have branded us “irresponsible,” but as Global Warming and other environmental crises daily demonstrate, stewarding the environment is among the most important of human responsibilities. “Stuck in a time warp”? When it comes to respecting the earth, hippies have been ahead of our time.

Yes, almost forty years ago today, Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play--four decades of counterculture. Despite its imperfections, hippiedom has been a boon to this country and this world. Let the counterculture celebrate that; let America acknowledge it.