mass movements 3

My mistake on Marx. I did thumb through a bio of his lately, but I don’t think I got beyond when he was a young Hegelian. Hegelian? I thought, and then my mind wandered.

At one level the army seems like the epitome of a mass movement. Everybody lives together, wears the same clothes, there is a clear chain of command. But I think it doesn’t tell you what to think. You have to obey orders, but between orders you can think what you like. You can be a dem a rep, a wiccan, an eckankar, a birther. Well I guess it has to be that way, because they pretty much have to accept everybody that wants to join. You would think they would want to instill a super patriotism, but then everybody has their own idea of patriotism and in the end it would be a distraction.

I guess the two pillars of hippiedom were drugs and the war. The drugs were marijuana and the psychedelics, maybe a little speed, but not too much, and pills and hard drugs were frowned on. The drugs came first, but then after you had smoked your way out of school and lost your deferment, the draft came into play and hence lefty politics.

The thing was, early on, it was all very nice. If you saw some other long haired guy, he was your brother, he would share his weed with you, his food, you could crash on his floor, he would give you money. Because the outside world generally frowned on us, and because we didn’t like them either, too square and they never had any weed to share with us, we generally lived together, on college campuses, in areas of big cities. I bet there was some little head shop in a rundown area of Cheboygan where the local hippies hung out.

And some were more dedicated, and some were more easy going and there were some who went in for conspiracy theories but we all had pretty much the same politics.

There was a certain amount of trust between us. No fellow hippie would burn you on a drug deal, a guy who was anti-war like you, would not try to screw your girlfriend. Well not very often.

What I particularly remember is community tax. There would be a little can in stores and restaurants that we frequented, and after you paid for what you came for, you put a few coins in the can, and then that was collected by, well I am not sure by who, call them community elders (well not really old, none of us were old, but guys who had been around longer), and they distributed it around. I knew some guys who ran some monthly radical rag funded by community tax.

That was the other thing, The Revolution. Everybody believed in The Revolution, or at any rate gave it lip service, because to believe otherwise would get you shunned by hippiedom. It was extremely vague as to what this meant, we just knew it was coming and we would somehow be a part of it. Nobody owned guns. Only a square would think that a revolution would need to be violent.

Well that’s all pretty silly, buy it did become popular. And here is the thing, when it was unpopular there was not much future in becoming a becoming a hippie, you just did because that is what you believed, but once it became popular, well there was a future in it, you might become a hippie just to reap the benefits.

Probably a better example is the commies. At first you just became one because that is what you believed, but once the commies started taking over, guys on the sidelines who might have been thinking of becoming a baker or a banker got to thinking, hey I could become a commissar. That’s what I think happens, as the movement grows it picks up people who are not true believers.

More next post.