Autistics and hippies

Post Reply New Topic

Actually, there isn't still a draft--they've switched over to intensive recruiting in poor neighborhoods and among high school students.

That's part of how mistreatment of soldiers (by people on their own side) is justified today; we have a voluntary military. I feel the need to point this out, despite personally being very much against these conflicts; I wore a black armband to school the day they started bombing Afganistan.

It's a back door draft and they know about it. They'd have never done away with the lottery if it hadn't been there. They know about it, they knew about it and they have recently stated they know it. (not like it needed to be validated) The thing is it's hard to make it work when the real purpose of the military is so in your face. There is only one reason for a military, only one.

You are more than welcome to call it anything you wish and believe in it fervently. I prefer to call a spade a spade. It has always been the poor that have born the brunt of war and I don't see it changing anytime soon. It's a draft because if there were any other way, they wouldn't do it. And yeah you have few that actually get their rocks off with that kind of thing. And yeah there are those that go in with all kinds of idealistic values, normally they get their heads turned around real fast, real fast.

End the draft, put an end to poverty. Make school affordable (free would be nice) for all, end the draft. And there is more and ending the draft won't be easy. But we sure would be a better place if we did.

Now after saying that, there is a serious danger in an all professional army. The Army was in open revolt when I was in during the Vietnam conflict and it did not make the papers. (and I helped, I'm so proud) People would have been scared shirtless if they had known and the military sure didn't want you to know. But those in power knew it and we knew it. See those that get drafted don't really want to be there to begin with and they don't get locked into the goosestep. Never say never, the history's are full of professional armies that didn't like what the bosses were telling them to do, so they changed the bosses. Hell it still goes on today.

I still freak out when a helicopter goes over. And it wasn't the helicopters at Woodstock that set that response in me up.

Do you think this is a hot button issue with me?

Now I think I got off topic, where were we, hiPpies? Yeah I knew a couple, what ya wanna know.

I often get called a hippie because of... not necessarily my clothes (though I have been known to wear more than a few long flowy skirts and shirts, and daisies in my hair, and barefeet or little sandals, or tie-die...), or my drug-taking (which is non-existent; never done any bar alcohol) or my 'free-love' attitude (which is also non-existent; long-term relationship here)... but because I'm very open and accepting, my 'thing' is herbal and natural medicine and healing using the power of nature, I love to travel and meet other cultures, a lot of my friends are 'hippies', I live a totally organic, chemical-free lifestyle, my political views are 'hippie'-ish (I think that means I don't like Bush and I'm anti-nuclear?), my favourite thing in summer is camping at the various festivals that've been around since those times and still kinda keep the ethos going...

Yeah.

So apparently I'm a hippie.

Whatever... doesn't worry me though, I don't apply labels. But if I were to have a label I'd rather that than anything else really.

"God, save me from this planet full of hippies!" - Eric Cartman

I was really into the hippie subculture for a while, mostly because of the music and drugs and general mindset of going "beyond." The influence of Eastern thought... not taking this illusory world too seriously, etc.

However, I do think there are probably more people with AS in the hippie culture than in the general population, for obvious reasons (mostly non-conformism, although of course there are plenty of very conformist hippies too).

I'm with you there, that was pretty sh***y to knock the Taliban out of power when they were doing such a good job of keeping people in line. Plus throwing flowers at the Taliban and singing Kumbaya would have caused them to lighten up eventually.

About the Secret Draft, I agree that it sucks to be kidnapping people in the dead of night to serve in the military.

IMO, "Die Hippie, Die", is one of the greatest pieces of fictional media ever.

Me was hippie for a few years,
well kinda,
I was rainbow child and deadhead.
It was fun while it lasted.

Last edited by aspergian_mutant on 17 Apr 2008, 10:25 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I'm not old enough to have been a 'real' hippie, but I vaguely remember them from my childhood. I remember the end of the Viet Nam war and how everybody hated Nixon. I remember being ticked off because Captain Kangaroo had been preempted by the news covering the Watergate scandal. That was a bummer. I later became a 'neo-hippie' in the mid-90s, but since then I've moved to the center left in the political spectrum. I hate the war, but I also hate the welfare system. I'm Pro-Choice, but I'm against higher taxes. I like the clothes, though. Hippie clothes, if nothing else, are very comfortable.

This is quite true, I got involved in the Punk scene in 1981, It was the only place that I felt I was of any worth. I know others who were in the scene in the town that I was in who I now realise as having an ASD.

These lines from the song American Pie have been interpreted as being about the alternative culture of the late sixties:

"Oh, and there we were all in one place,
A generation lost in space
With no time left to start again."

I like that song. I was in 7th Grade and in love with my math teacher Miss Beck.

Hippies and freaks were two different things. Hippies were the "flower children," very laid back and aiming at peace.

Freaks were the "darker side." They were more heavily into drugs, often heroin as opposed to just blowing some marijuana. Their musical tastes ran to the Doors and the Rolling Stones, as opposed to Donovan or the Mamas and the Papas.

I found both to be accepting of difference in people.

Not a hippie, just a social liberal.

I grew up in the 90's. Unfortunately, by the time I came about, all the old hippies, some of whom purportedly still subscribed to the old notions of what the lifestyle meant, had become what they hated: old fogeys who hated what they didn't understand about youth and therefore tried to ban or denigrate it. It wasn't drugs or promiscuity, it was video games, computers and "violent" media. The ones I knew talked a big game about tolerance and how blacks, women and others fought the good fight for the sake of equality, but said nothing, did nothing when the people under their care got hurt or mistreated for being different. Ironically, by being the equivalent of what they were to their parents' generation, I became their worst nightmare. Such people became known to me as time went on as the hippie-crites. Or had they just lost their memory as a result of all the drug use? I wonder if during its height their counterculture would've actually been accepting of a person like me. That would've been nifty.

I think that the mere fact that they were still stuck in the "hippie" lifestyle in the 90's demonstrates that those individuals never really understood the 60's but simply stuck the "labels" on themselves and never took them off.

Anyone who acted as you described deserves your derision.

In the 80's, when I was in graduate school, I took a creative writing workshop that included a lot of undergrads. They were reflective of the "punk" culture of the time. We got along very well, and they complimented me on my creativity and imagination, as I did theirs.

To look at me today, you would not easily imagine who I was in the late 60's. I am who I am today and my nephews and nieces, who sound a lot like you, do not seem to have any trouble communicating with me. Nor do my college students.