Revenge of the Hippies
No longer an alternate lifestyle for the estranged and disaffected, their dysfunction is now mainstream and compulsory.
I’m old enough to remember when hippies were harmless. Prior generations perhaps called them bohemians - nonconformists and free spirits who were essentially harmless to others - excepting of course their patrons, whom they sponged off like parasites. To be someone in the elite circles then, you kept a pet bohemian whose artistic eccentricities were prized and envied, if only for the casual cost of such indulgence. One paid good money to be insulted and debased by a puerile madman with no stake in civilized society. And the very best bohemians were college-educated and offspring of elite society themselves - utterly disdainful of materialism, they were hedonists and nihilistic deconstructionists, yet versed in modern scientific socialism.
In the 60s and 70s, the bohemian lifestyle went mainstream as the Greatest Generation witnessed many of their children (the Boomers) “turn on, tune in, drop out” - growing their hair long, affecting the lifestyle of bums, taking psychotropic drugs, joining the antiwar movement and living a carefree, stoned, self-indulgent existence of casual sex and pronounced non-judgmentalism - provided you were one of them. Like the bohemians of a prior generation, they relentlessly insulted and disparaged their patrons - their parents and their parents’ generation who’d sacrificed years of their lives to bestow the freedom to indulge a painfully narcissistic “phase” which thankfully most of them would grow out of eventually.
Every generation it seems must go through a petulant phase of wondering “why do we do it this way?” Why do we have to go to school, get a job, pay rent, get married, get a mortgage and pay bills and taxes? Where’s the fun in all that responsibility? I can well imagine our early homo-sapiens ancestors’ kids wondering why we had to keep a fire, constantly improve shelters, hunt, gather firewood and forage - why can’t we just sit around and play with sticks?
I’m bolstered in this confidence - that every generation passes through a self-indulgent phase - by the apostle Paul who wrote in his first letter to the Corinthians (13:11) “When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things.” That was around 2000 years ago.
So what explains today? The tantrum throwers we’re witnessing aren’t “passing through a phase” - they’re well past adolescence with many of them middle age and older (Biden is 79 and Pelosi is in her 80s). We seem to be witnessing the ascendance of a generation of bohemians whose whole focus is dead-serious set on “childish things”. Biden’s life story has been as a “moderate” while Pelosi was at worst a temperate leftist - today they’re both bomb-throwing radical extremists, indistinguishable from common campus radicals of 60 years ago.
Call it the Revenge of the Hippies. They wanted to release hell on earth back then - and now they’re in a place they can do that.
And not just childish things, but destructive. It’s as if the homo-sapiens’ offspring of yesteryear are pouring water on the fire, sabotaging shelter, scaring the game away and intentionally trampling the forage. If just one generation had done that millions of years ago, we wouldn’t have survived as a species.
Only a fantastically wealthy and successful people can afford the luxury of these modern-day bohemians. But even then, in only limited circumstances: we don’t dare put them in charge of anything. The load-bearing walls of civilization can take some amount of criticism and abuse - they can’t take being dynamited by lunatics bent on bringing the whole structure down. Sane people keep them away from the dynamite.
And yet, that’s exactly what the modern Democrats have done. We have a president who can’t string together coherent sentences even when they’re printed on notecards or displayed on a teleprompter. Who spent the past 15 months assaulting the energy sector with Executive Orders, revoked permits, increased taxes, fees and red tape, canceled leases and the placing of all remaining federal lands off-limits to drilling. And now he curses them for slowing production - of a product he considers to be literally poison!
We have a vice president who’s failed up from border czar to Ukraine diplomacy to now “misinformation” management. A secretary of defense whose least concern seems to be the fighting of actual enemies. A secretary of energy who literally laughs at the soaring price of energy. A secretary of transportation who earnestly believes our transportation infrastructure is “racist” in its design. An attorney general quick to investigate parents at school board meetings yet who then turns a deaf ear to physical threats against Supreme Court justices.
The list goes on. A treasury secretary who tells us that trillions in government “stimulus” spending didn’t cause the 40 year record inflation we’re experiencing. A CDC director who passionately advocates for a Covid vaccine for young children even when her own center’s data show that risks from the vaccine exceed any potential benefit.
And this only scratches the surface. We now have corporate governance indulging in this insanity. It’s as if the mission statements of Disney, Netflix, Facebook, Twitter and all these other “woke corporations” has nothing to do with shareholder value. The purpose of these businesses is apparently to “change the world”, not provide products and services (create value) that people actually want and are willing to pay for.
And what of this “new world” they wish to usher in?
They don’t care if our kids read, write and do sums significantly behind all other western nations, provided they get each others’ pronouns right - and are accessed to “health essential, gender-affirming care” on demand, by children as young as five, without parental involvement! At the rate they’re destroying the mental health of our children today, they’ll be lucky they survive to adulthood - but then just what kind of adults are these kids going to make?
They don’t care if you can heat or light your home this winter or drive your car to work tomorrow - we’re moving to “all electric” on the express lane! If you don’t have 60 thousand bucks for an electric car, don’t sweat it. They have no idea where the electricity is going to come from to power electric vehicles anyway - as they’ve banned every reliable means of generating electricity. And even if they could produce the electricity, there’s no means of delivering significantly more of it to your home - our electric transport infrastructure is already maxed out. And if anybody dare makes a move to beef up our electricity infrastructure, you can bet they’ll put a stop to that too!
They don’t care if you eat. Food production produces methane and CO2 and requires fossil fuels to run farm equipment and produce fertilizer. So we’re now on the front end of an American food shortage. Think about that. Your parents grew up in an America where obesity was the greatest health challenge, and were told stories about famines and food shortages in other countries. Your kids and grandkids will get to experience it first hand.
They don’t care if you commit crimes - even violent felonies! In fact, they’ve made it so you won’t spend even one night in jail - no cash bond and you’re back on the street before your last victim’s body was even cold. These policies have turned LA, Chicago and New York into dystopian hell-holes of violence.
They don’t care if you skip on paying back your student loans, either. You’re stupid if you do. They’ll saddle some uneducated, hard-working single mom working two jobs to pay for your five years of extended adolescence.
As for drug crimes - we really don’t have those anymore. In fact, the government is actively handing out free drug paraphernalia at taxpayer expense. Meanwhile the drugs are plentiful because the border is wide open and unenforced.
You remember the so-called CHOP Zone in Seattle? Capital Hill Occupation Protest zone - an autonomous zone where only “hippy rules” were applied? No cops, no rule of law, no property rights. Life there was violent, hungry and short-lived.
That’s the prototype for America under the hippies. They have no plans for anything, just a list of demands you’re expected to accede to. No plans for producing energy. No plans for producing food. No plans for anything - just rules they demand you live by. Like the beatniks and bohemians of yesteryear, except those people never even took themselves seriously.
It is unwise to generalize. The hippies were acid-fueled descendants of the beatniks and a natural evolution in society. Those in power today were probably not hippies and those gullible enough to swallow the lies of the media are simply stupid.