“Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery; none but ourselves can free our minds ” -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Bob Marley

Apparently, you can’t call post-sixties hippies “hippies.“ Consider:

A San Francisco-based belly dancer, she and her colleagues are tattooed and pierced; she’s vegetarian, always performs barefoot. Their genre, “tribal fusion,” is, like hippie culture itself, eclectic--part gypsy, part other things she’s hesitant to identify. Some of these women, and some of their men, wear dreadlocks. Yet when asked if she and tribal fusion are hippie, she seems uncomfortable. She prefers “bohemian.”

I contact an artist who’s drawn something for a national magazine to accompany a piece on a girlhood spent in the counterculture. In the illustration, a woman with short dreads is flashing the peace sign as surrounding “straight” businessmen wag condemning fingers at her. I suspect the illustration is a self-portrait. When the artist tells me she’s a “vegan and activist” and admits, “I suppose I do share some values with them [hippies],” I’m thinking, she probably is hippie. But she bridles at the term: it has “connotations of drug use.” Seeing hippies, apparently, as stereotypical drug abusers, she wants no part of that.

In 1999 New York Times reporter Ann Powers profiled some followers of Phish. “With their natural-fiber clothing, vegetarian diets and predilection for trippy music, the members of the jam-bands scene seem to be carrying on the legacy of their hippie forbears”; further, they “appear to have stepped from photographs of [Woodstock].“ But don’t call them hippie. One objects, “I don’t know what a hippie was.” Another adds, “The term is such a convoluted stereotype. It’s an explosive cliché.“ Powers concludes, “ . . . many [such] young people disassociate themselves from the image of the stoned hippie living in a hazy fantasy.”

It's 2004, and I'm in a hippie microbrewery/restaurant in Boulder, CO. He’s wearing a hemp necklace, a tie-dye under his jacket, and a baseball cap with an "Eat a Peach”* logo. An alternative nutritionist from Pittsburgh, he's thrilled to have found this clearly countercultural place--a home away from home. Well, he seems pretty hippie to me. I later ask him if there’s a significant "hippie community" in Pittsburgh. "Oh," he responds, suddenly uncomfortable, "I wouldn't know about that. I don't have much to do with that crowd."

A Midwesterner recently relocated to a Colorado mountain town, he looks hippie and acts hippie, frequenting, for instance, the local natural-organic grocery/restaurant; yes, he sometimes smokes pot. Yet, when casually asked if he sees himself as a hippie, he trumpets indignantly, “Hippie?! Why heck no. I’m a mountain man!”

Sometime in 2005, I happen into a conversation with a guy who looks very countercultural, and we find ourselves discussing the definition of hippie. "Hippies ended with the sixties," he scoffs; "There aren’t any hippies today."
I nod towards an overtly countercultural couple standing twenty feet away, asking, “Okay, so if there are no hippies today, what do you call those people?”
“I don’t know what you call them,” he responds almost bitterly, “but you can’t call them hippies!”

One Tom Elliot writes at Hippyland.com: “I'm not sure I agree with your definition of Hippies . . . . But, then, even in those days [the sixties?] I never really understood what the hell people meant by the term. I always seemed to fit others' definition of the term but never felt like I 'belonged' to their definitions.”

It’s 2003; headed to Nederland, a small mountain town and countercultural enclave just west of Boulder, I pick up a hitcher. He’s about 25, a beard, dreadlocks, hemp jewelry. He chats idly about his “hippie“ Nedfriends. Eventually I ask, “So, how do you react to being called ’hippie’? Are you a hippie?” Suddenly defensive, he explains how the hippies were a people of the past--pure and of lofty ideals. Hippies today are trying to be like those people, he adds, but it would be presumptuous for anyone to call him or herself a hippie.

Well, surely the pattern is apparent: many hippies hate to be called hippie. Although we might be tempted to dismiss this discomfort as a mere academic matter, a disagreement about definitions, it’s actually of great importance at both the personal and socio-political levels.

In the personal realm, we can see a people reeling from the various stereotypical images they believe “hippie” conjures, and the wide use of euphemisms employed can only be explained as a painful avoidance of the term.

Question: How did hippie come to be a dirty word, an epithet? Answer: largely by an ongoing campaign of hippie hating and stereotyping in America’s mainstream media, political arena and social life. That’s why so many identifiably hippie people dread being called “hippie”: it shames and humiliates because they assume it stereotypes. Of course, stereotypes don’t accurately describe a population; they tend to “bottom feed,” focusing on only the most negative and degraded, unfairly treating them as if they were representative, the group norm.

So, if you don’t fit those stereotypes, welcome to the club; almost none of us do. Yet often, we still hold on to the notion (a sort of psychological defense, I suppose) that hippies are always somebody else--not us, for heaven‘s sake.

Here’s the thing: when we feel that hurt at being labeled “hippie,” when we reel under that stereotyping, it’s because we’ve made a terrible choice. “No one,” said Eleanor Roosevelt, “can make you feel inferior without your permission.” She was right. In squirming at the sound of hippie, many post-sixties hippies have given the bigots and hippie haters permission to make them feel inferior.

Now, the Nedhead uses what I call the Mythic Definition. As he defines them, hippies are a mythical tribe of holy people. Wizards, Gurus and Gandalfs, oh my! But if this approach is at least a positive, it’s also ahistorical and inaccurate, ignoring today’s hippies and romanticizing those of the past. Worse still, it too humiliates: who can measure up to such an absurd standard? “Oops, sorry. Can’t perform any miracles just now. Left my magical staff at home today.” So the Mythic Definition also gives permission to feel inferior; it embarrasses. That’s why Nedguy is so out of sorts, so apparently uncomfortable in his own skin--he‘s not worthy of being called “a hippie.“

In the same vein is our acceptance of the “just-a-thing-of-the-sixties” cliche. Yeah, “everybody” knows it. Unfortunately, everybody is also in denial. Anyone with eyes, anyone who chooses, can any day see evidence of a living, vibrant post-sixties counterculture here in America and many other nations. The origins of this decade-specific definition of hippie lie with those who want hippie culture dead, for it to be a thing of the past. If you want to cave in to them, pander to their prejudices by reciting that hateful, self-denying cliché, then again, that’s a choice you’re making.

And it’s a terrible choice. That’s because these definitional issues are often related to mental-health issues; after all, the words you use--or choose to avoid--to describe yourself are an important aspect of your identity. If you need euphemisms to describe yourself, if you wince at your given name, or if you see yourself as a phony trying to live up to impossible goals, don’t those all indicate a self-esteem problem?

In the above examples, we can also see intimidation; often, it doesn’t seem quite safe to claim countercultural/hippie identity: “Will I be accused of being a drug addict, of being a traitor to my nation, of being a menace to youth, of being a lazy parasite? Will I be arrested or in some way punished?”

Okay, let’s be honest: yes, life is scary, and often, it seems prudent to reduce risks, but in being afraid to call ourselves “hippie,” we’re being bullied. You can decide for yourself how brave you’ll be in this life, but enabling bullies is a course no honest person considers healthy or helpful to self or society.

So, on the personal level, being able to call oneself hippie in a post-sixties world is coming out of the cultural closet, a way of saying, “My culture is alive, and I’m not ashamed or afraid to say I’m hippie; I do not give you permission to make me feel inferior. I’m comfortable with my ethnic choice, with my identity; you should be too.” Standing up, being honest, heals; it‘s coming home --”Dream more easy in the chair that really fits you . . . .”**

Then, there are the socio-political implications. Euphemizing doesn’t give us a coherent, common term that we can all recognize and relate to, something that might accurately describe us. “Bohemian”? Well, what kind of bohemian? After all, there’ve been many such communities throughout history. “Mountain men”? What’s that about? We need a name that works.

Then, there’s that guy on the sidewalk--he doesn’t euphemize; indeed, he has no word for us at all. Well, what’s a people without a name? Such a community is crippled: without even a simple word to identify itself, how is that group to even talk about itself, talk to itself?

Ethnic groups, incidentally, sometimes change their names. Indians became Native Americans; Negroes and colored people became first Blacks and then African-Americans. Outside the ethnic realm, homosexuals became gays. And lesbians chose to reclaim and redefine lesbian. But for effective renaming to happen, a group has to function as a group; it has to be able to arrive at some decision about a new name. So, before you can get a new name, you first need an old name.

For now, we’d be wise to reclaim and redefine hippie; later, if we decide to change that name, we can. In particular, I suggest we call ourselves hippie-Americans (let the hippie-Dutch call themselves that and so forth). It’s respectful, it communicates ethnicity, and it undermines the prejudice here in America that counterculturists are anti-American, that we hate our homeland.

Here is a proposed redefinition of hippie:

A member of an ethnic group formed in the late 1960s in various nations penetrated by Western media and continuing today into the 21st Century as many older hippies retain that identity and younger ones choose and/or inherit it. Often known as "the counterculture," hippie culture is an eclectic fusion identified with natural/organic foods; "alternative," holistic medicine; marijuana use and hemp products; hallucinogenic art, including tie-dyes; distinctive norms of appearance and dress; much popular "rock" music, particularly Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Grateful Dead, among many others; values that question authority and emphasize the natural, healing, informality and personal freedom; and other distinctive cultural traits. Today, there may be as many as 100 million hippies in the world.

Now that’s an accurate, non-judgmental, scientific and modern definition of hippie--a healthy definition we can live with.

Step out of the closet, hippie-Americans. It’s not the word hippie that’s humiliating you; it’s the prejudice too often behind it. A hippie by any other name would still be a hippie, so for now, at least, let’s call ourselves that, and stop being embarrassed about it. Remember, we’re not criminals: we’re a people criminalized. Do not grant permission to feel inferior.

 

FN1--”Eat a Peach” is the name of a famous album by a hippie rock band from the American South, The Allman Brothers.
FN2--A lyric from “Heart of the Sunrise,” by the American countercultural rock band Yes.