A few weeks ago the annual Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival came to San Francisco. A free, three day music festival in Golden Gate Park, with six stages of the biggest and best bluegrass bands and associated styles.
A quick maths exercise (or math, for those soon to be conquered), what do you get when you combine a park, bluegrass music, and the word ‘free’.
Hippies, thousands and thousands of hippies.
After spending some time with these people, allowing them to draw on my face, enlighten me with their world views, and dance in the street to drunken fiddle playing, I feel that the hippie is often misunderstood. And as the hippie species supposedly originated right here in San Francisco back in the sixties, I will therefore dedicate this entry to hippies everywhere.
Also, I see some parallels with the sixties hippie movement and the current Occupy Wall Street / Occupy Everything movements that are taking place. Both the sixties hippies and the current Occupiers are huge international counter-culture, grass roots movements that are shouting that they want things to be better, and that the people in power do not represent their philosophies. As such, I thought it would be interesting to explore the historical mirror to the Occupy movement.
When the word hippie is used, it conjures up many different ideas. Drugs, politics, drugs, sex, drugs, spirituality, drugs. It is a way of life. So firstly let’s take a look at some of the events that shaped the movement.
Climb aboard the hippie roller-coaster, friends!
The Vietnam War
One of the most notable aspects of the sixties was the USA’s involvement with the Vietnam war. Vietnam’s history is very complicated, but basically in 1945 Vietnam was owned by France, France and Japan, Japan, the Vietnamese, England (we always needs to get a piece), China, France and Japan, then France. All in less than a year.
As a result of all this nonsense, North and South Vietnam had serious issues for the next twenty years, and eventually everything became about who wanted to be communist or not. Communism tends to make all problems worse for some reason.
Pictured: The Communist Party
So naturally in the sixties with the whole Cold War situation, America was supporting the Vietnamese who didn’t want to be communists, you know, by sending them cake and such.
The decision to actually go to full blown war with North Vietnam was made in response to the North Vietnam navy firing on the USS Maddox warship in 1964, which happened to be hanging around the Gulf of Tonkin for some reason, (the Gulf of Tonkin is so deep in North Vietnam that the USS Maddox probably could have waved to the sunbathers on the beach there). This incident meant that regular Americans suddenly cared about what happened in Vietnam, and the American government got enough public support to send troops in.
However in 2005, an internal National Security Agency historical study was declassified, and said that the North Vietnam attack on the USS Maddox never happened. Here is a link to the report if you are interested...
So basically America sent over two million soldiers to Vietnam for no reason. But look on the bright side, America and France were at one point even discussing the possibilities of using nuclear weapons in Vietnam, which would have been very embarrassing if they had gone ahead with that.
Vietnam war protesters suddenly realising that America’s domestic policy
is worryingly similar to America’s foreign policy
By the end of it all, 58,000 US troops were killed and 1.1 million North Vietnamese troops were killed. Public opinion in America became deeply upset at how the war was handled, because in addition to the above, when you are so unsure about civilian deaths that they could be anywhere between 0.5 million and 2 million, you know you really messed up. Naturally, this raised humanitarian concerns about America’s ability to handle a conflict.
At the same time...
African-American Civil Rights Movements
Roughly between 1955 and 1968, American civil rights were characterised by campaigns of civil resistance by African-Americans, Mexicans, assorted non-whites, and their supporters. Activities ranged from sit-ins, marches, boycotts, civil disobedience and a whole host of other non-violent resistance methods.
Also riots, plenty of violent and awful riots. I thought about using a picture of the riots, but they made me sad, so instead here is a picture of Martin Luther King playing pool like a badass.
"Take that, white ball!"
Some of us are too young to remember what everyone was so upset about. Some notable examples were acceptable racial discrimination in education, employment, wages and financial services such as mortgages. There was also segregation on public transport, toilets, water fountains and other public facilities. Basically if you weren’t white in America then you were last in line for everything, and by the time you got to the front of the line all you got was a water cannon to the face.
Below is an image of nine African-American students being escorted by federal soldiers into Little Rock public school in 1957 (in Birmingham Alabama), to illustrate how much white people really didn’t want to sit next to a “coloured” kid in class.
It is sobering to consider that my parents were old enough to walk when this was happening
Although I can understand America’s need to racially segregate in schools, because how else would the white kids win any sports?
1967 African-American Athlete meeting-
Bill Russell, Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown, and Kareem Abdul Jabar, Carl Stokes, Walter Beach, Bobby Mitchell, Sid Williams, Curtis McClinton, Willie Davis, Jim Shorter, and John Wooten
-Oh Snap!
Between 1964 and 1968 all the major laws were passed to protect against racial discrimination, the main one being The Civil Rights Act of 1964 which outlawed segregation in various places, but it took a while for culture to catch up with the law.
Now it would only be fair to show how far England has come, in regards to racial issues. With that in mind, here is a picture of me last year with a golliwog doll on sale in shop close to where I lived in England.
Offensive and terrifying in equal amounts...
Also the doll is pretty bad.
As a Direct or Indirect Result...
...of all these distasteful issues and how badly they were handled by those in power, America and Britain elected left wing governments, 32 countries (mainly African) gained independence from their European colonial rulers, and it seemed the philosophies of peace and love were taking hold as the world was becoming more globalized and people were recognising that people around the world weren’t so different from themselves. Apart from in Germany, where they built a wall.
Although it looks like the hippies got to it eventually
Mix these sentiments of anti-establishment, peace and equality, with the invention of the Contraceptive Pill (suddenly everyone can have spontaneous sex with no babies!) sprinkle in some good music and recreational drugs to enhance that sex and America managed to create hippies. What we recognise today as the stereotypical hippie image originated in California, supposedly right here in San Francisco in the Haight district (pronounced as hate) where young hippies formed large groups to be able to rent expensive apartments, forming the prototypes of the communities that still exist today.
Are the events of the sixties that led up to the counter culture of hippies being formed being mirrored today? A decade long war in a country for reasons that the public doesn’t really understand? People in charge making bad decisions that affect millions and not being held accountable? Police assaulting peaceful protesters around the world who simply want the world to be a better and fairer place?
We clearly have so much in common...
You decide. For now, tying some the themes of this entry together nicely, allow me to leave you with a portion of a speech by Martin Luther King Jr, delivered on April 4th 1967 at Riverside Church, New York, while speaking on the subject of the Vietnam War.
-A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love.-
