 "So Help Me Hanna" is a new, interactive column in honor of a lovely young woman, Ms Hanna Louise of Oslo, Norway, who wrote to the Hippie Museum earlier this year in quest of the stories and insights of Americans who are identified with the hippie movement. The following is an edited version of the two letters I sent Hanna in response to her questions. I'm offering it here, not because I'm megalomaniac or because I think my personal experience is more interesting or more valid than anyone else's. What we're hoping is that you, the readers, will write back to the Hippie Museum with YOUR tales and thoughts of what a hippie history or identity means to you. We're hoping to have this as an ongoing column in which any reader can be an op-ed columnist; true participatory journalism, social science, and community-building! Hanna's original survey questions included most of the topics I discuss in the following article in terms of my own life. I made the choice to omit those questions here, partly because of space considerations. In writing your own response about how hippie values have influenced your life, you might want to think about how you live, inwardly and outwardly: not just music, dress and hairstyles, but also your spiritual and community life, how you eat and care for yourself and your family and the earth, what kinds of work are and aren't part of your world, what means you use to what ends. And thank you, Hanna, for inspiring this exchange! Dear Hanna, Thank you so much for contacting me about my history as a hippie. You asked, "are you truly a hippie today?" and I have to smile. Truly, there are no membership cards, as far as I know, no circle of hippie elders who will throw a person out of the circle for not conforming to some hippie standard, and no required set of behaviors that will qualify, or disqualify, any person who identifies with hippie values. It took me a little longer than I anticipated to begin to answer your questions. This is, at least in part, because they are about very important matters. In some cases, the questions themselves seem to beg deeper questions. If I may. I am going to paraphrase Ina May Gaskin, author of Spiritual Midwifery and spouse of an important US hippie philosopher/spiritual teacher in semi-retirement, Stephen Gaskin. As Ina May pointed out in someof her writings, so much of the popular image of hippie culture has been focused on "sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll" that the really important contributions that hippies and their values made to a larger society are often overlooked or diminished. You are correct in seeing ties between hippie culture and its predecessors in Beat and earlier bohemian movements in the US and elsewhere. I think that in a large, pluralistic society such as those of North America and industrialized Western Europe (village culture, especially in Europe has been less diverse and more isolated), there have always been subcultures of philosophic and artistic rebels who live by another set of principles. In other words, hippies are part of a long and honorable trazdition of freethinkers and builders of new societal models. I was born in the mid 1950s, an eldest child, about ten years into the post-World War II Baby Boom. My parents were artistic, politically liberal, and influenced by Beat culture in many ways. I was conceived in Greenwich Village, New York City, and born in Los Angeles, my mother's hometown, (where my father also spent his adolescence and young adulthood.) My parents were no radicals, however; their lives were very much tied into the achievement promises of post-WWII US. Sometimes it made for a rather crazy amalgam; were they more Greenwich Village beatnik-y sorts or more upwardly mobile suburbanites who expected conformity? What did they expect their children to *do*, and not do, exactly? It wasn't always an easy home in which to live, because the rules were so fluid and contradictory at times. My father's only sibling, his elder sister Elizabeth, was always somewhat bohemian. I've come to think that living on "the fringes of the accepted" is something that may be present in some of us, like musical talent or sexual orientation, from birth or before. I've often thought so about myself. My aunt, who married young and had two children in the early 1940s,, was part of the Beat scene in St. Louis and later in San Francisco, where she moved after the breakup of her first marriage. Elizabeth, who went by Betty until Stephen Gaskin urged all his followers and students to use their full adult "handles," was in her forties when she divorced her first husband and moved back to San Francisco. She operated a successful import and antique jewelery business. This made her among the eldest people, to make the Haight Ashbury scene. It lent a certain mystique to our family that my "Aunt Betty" as I knew her was, by 1967 or so, a fulltime hippie in the Haight Ashbury. Friends have since called me "hippie nobility" on this account; it was a piquant detail to have in one's background in junior high school. I have five elder "god-sisters" who were the children of my parents' closest friends, and almost all of them were influenced by hippie dress, clothing, music, practices,and values in some ways, and so was I. (I have a sixth sister in this extended family, younger than me, more prone thus to be influenced by me and by her blood and extended sisters than the other way around.) By the time I was 13 or 14, I was a committed teenaged intellectual hippie type, so to speak...which is funny because decades later, when I was 38 and pregnant, those are exactly the words that the property manager for our house used to describe me, and my husband, to a prospective downstairs neighbor, "oh, you won't have any trouble with Judith and Arnold if you can handle their mild messiness; they are these very quiet, intellectual hippie types." The person to whom she so described us moved in a few weeks before my baby was born in the house, and we became good friends. So what do I have to show for all this background now? 35 years of experience at being vegetarian in various forms ( I would have become vegetarian years earlier, along with my closest friend at age 12, but my mother was adamantly opposed because, without any formal training in nutrition, she "knew" this was "no way for a child to eat") and a peace and justice activist for about that long. I went to many antiwar demonstrations in Los Angeles and San Francisco in my early adolescence, and met such notable personalities through that as Yippie co-founder Abbie Hoffman, and antiwar veterans like Ron Kovic of "Born on the Fourth of July" fame. I have been a student of natural medicine and healing, a do-it-yourselfer who learned organic gardening at Waldorf school in high school, and a strong advocate for the homebirthing renaissance, to which I was also introduced in high school. There have always been class differences within any socially defined group or movement, and hippies were no exception. Some people were middle class, with parents who could afford to send them to college, and indeed, some college students lived much as hippies with some financial support from their families. Some hippies were runaways from abusive homes who literally had nothing and no one to turn to in case of a sudden disaster, or what today are sometimes called "throwaway" children, the kids who got kicked out of home or who no one wanted. Some came from lives of relative privilege, even from truly wealthy families, where they simply did not fit in. You asked about the "dirty" stigma on hippies as a group. I think much of this is about class, again. The more middle-class college students, and college dropouts even, often have had access to running water, opportunities to wash their clothes and bodies, fresh nutritious food (and perhaps a place to grow it), etc. These benefits are much in contrast to the poorest and most un-connected who were quite literally on the streets making the hippie scene because they had nowhere to go. One change,especially true in California where I still live, between now and the late 60s-early 70s, is that the price of housing has become so astronomical that even with middle-class skills and a college degree or two, and an income that a do-it-yourself hippie type could have lived very comfortably on in 1974, it's getting harder and harder to pay the buills and live anything like the hippie Good Life. By this, I eman it's less attainable than it was in my young adulthood to live in a place with a garden, keep an old car running, (let alone buy a new one), buy into even a small place "out in the country" with like-minded friends, etc. You mention a stereotype of hippies as "lazy and no good." That's funny; finding it funny keeps me from getting angry at any fool who'd so accuse. There are definitely people whose behavior and grooming and demeanor test the stereotype of the "lazy shiftless panhandler." Today, I hope we recognize that many people who fulfill that negative stereotype are either seriously mentally damaged or very poor, or often both. Not too many people who feel they have any choice about it are standing on street corners in filthy clothes and spare-changing by choice. Meanwhile, "laziness" has very little to do with the lives of the people who pioneered what has been called Weatern "karma yoga." My aunt commented on a visit to one of California's open land communes around 1968 or 1969 that that "some people put in gardens while others drank and littered." I much prefer the company of the former, and think that if there was a downside to a lot of the open-land and other communal experiments as they manifested, it was exactly this; the schism between the gardeners and the litterers. That being said, I still think we have to look at class differences even among the communards of the time. I'm identified with the people who started hippie farms and community gardens, organized free medical clinics and alternative radio stations, studied midwifery when they wanted to birth their own babies, learned to use tools well and build their own homes or fix up beautiful, hundred-year-old falling-down old houses that no one else much appreciated at the time. Not much "lazy" behavior in any of those! Judith Gips...you can e-mail me at comadre@mindspring.com if you like. Stay tuned for part 2 - "You asked about "drugs," rather a loaded topic, no pun intended." intended." To add your own input and writings to "So Help Me Hanna", or to communicate further with Judith email candycapshroom@yahoo.com  Journalings and Interactive Columns |