Long Ago

I am sixty-two years old. I was part of the counter-culture generation. I was a hippie. People bantering that word about now as if it were a foul insult, never met or don’t remember the hippies.

We lived in converted Victorian houses chopped up into apartments with archways, huge windows full of plants, tapestries on the walls and incense in every corner. We drank herbal tea sweetened with honey, ate brown rice and listened to Bob Dylan. We talked and read politics – not to mention poetry, law and ethics – while the sunlight played over the faded colors on old floral rugs. We marched for peace, social equality and economic justice. We believed in those things; most of us still do. Sex, drugs and Rock N’ Roll notwithstanding, we were deadly serious in our purpose.

Those people who berate Occupy with the word hippie are doing them a great service without knowing it. Those people who insist that Occupy is an unfocused group of rabble-rousers would do well to remember that my generation of rabble-rousers stopped the War in Viet Nam.