I first heard about the hippies (though the word wasn’t coined then) in June 1967 when my best friend urged me to go with him to San Francisco. He said there was something happening on the streets. It didn’t sound interesting and I went to Massachusetts for a summer of social work instead.  However, I could not escape a counter cultural torrent that was flooding America.  There were psychedelic drugs, the mystical music of Donovan, and the Beatles’ “Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” In 1968 I read Edgar Cayce’s On Prophecy and was convinced that we were on the cusp of the Age of Aquarius.

It didn’t work out exactly as I envisioned it, but it is fair to ask whether the hippie world view of the 1960s makes any sense today.

Today we don’t have the “harmony and understanding, sympathy and trust abounding” as the Broadway musical Hair proclaimed. However, I still believe that humanity will enter a golden age in the near future and that the turmoil of today is just a necessary preparation. Right now the futility of petty nationalism, sectarianism, racism and intolerance are on display, and I am confident that these  evils will be rejected and replaced with a recognition that humanity is one and indivisible. I just don’t know how long it will take and can’t give the date, but it will come about sooner than many people can imagine.

What about drugs? The hippies believed that when everyone “turned on” then the world would become a paradise. They were really wrong on this point. At the beginning of the 1960s narcotics, marijuana and other drugs were confined to a small segment of society. The hippies helped spread their use throughout society, but the results have been disastrous.

To be fair to the hippies, they thought of drugs as a path to spiritual experience. Here they were on to something. Meditation, yoga and spiritual quests beyond the confines of traditional religion have become main-stream and in part we can thank the hippies for this.

The hippies also wanted to get back to the land. Around the world this has not happened and people continue to flood to the cities.  The hippie wish for a rural ecotopia seems to be only a vision and not a reality.  However, who is to say whether the urbanization trend will continue indefinitely? Perhaps excessive centralization in the cities will one day give way to a more decentralized way of life, with economic enterprises and cultural activities spread out across the countryside.  If this happens we can also tip our hats to the hippies.

I think we need dreams and visions of a better world if we are to get out of our ruts and move on to something better, so I thank the hippies for their “craziness.”