We Called Ourselves Freaks

Yes, we were Hippies, but we were serious. We differentiated ourselves because of our intentions. Hippies were only serious about partying; we were just as interested in social change, most immediately protesting the needless war in Vietnam and the breathtaking injustices of our racist and sexist culture, and the greedy bastards on Wall Street who have since shown us just how evil they could grow up to be. Sad, sad, sad!

You would see us in our frayed jeans and work shirts, almost a uniform, denying our feathered and brocaded brethren. We called ourselves Freaks.

Throughout the 1980s it fascinated me to watch the media trash and trivialize a movement that encompassed almost a third of a generation.  After the end of the war in 1975 and the following descent into madness that was Watergate, Hippies were roundly caricatured and forgotten as quickly as possible (with the exception of rock and roll bands), and never did you hear the name for the people who brought us the environmental movement, the food co-ops and organic farming, the tenants unions, the free clinics. A whole generation of idealists left unnamed and uncelebrated and relegated to the shallow "me generation" drug culture that had caused the righteous hardworking middle class so much grief, as if we were adolescents going through puberty. In fact, it was a different kind of puberty to learn in your 20s that all those 1950s Sunday School Christian Values we were taught were degrees of, if not outright, lies.

We Freaks did not get over it. We still sit out here watching with outrage a cultural demise so extreme that we cannot believe it. A disconnect with our most sincere belief that we could make a difference, that modern tools could make life better for masses of people. Who said that a cynic is a disillusioned idealist? He was correct.