"It was the Hippies, they did it!"

I was listening to a call-in radio program while driving through Alabama recently in which they were discussing who the real enemies of “America” are and just who is responsible for the decline and approaching end of the USA. I was not able to follow all that was said but I do remember one caller in particular who said that “It was the hippies who started it.”

No details were given as to who “the hippies” were nor exactly what their actions were that have had such momentous effect. The hosts of the program, “Rick and Bubba,” offered no resistance to the thesis, and seemed to me to be in general empathy with the caller's calm assurance that it was so.

Now, the funny thing is, I also felt a lot of empathy for the remark that it was the hippies who did it, even though Rick and Bubba and their caller would probably include me in their category of “hippies.”

The comment seems absurd on its face. Just think of the horror of the Viet-Nam war and what it did to the country, and anything “the hippies” were or could have done was nothing in comparison. Martin Luther King Jr. was out there saying that the USA was sick with racism and that the USA was the greatest purveyor of violence in the world, and yet Rick and Bubba's caller gave “the hippies” the fundamental credit, or discredit, for destroying the country as they saw it.

But if we consider the remark with respect for the subconscious as I have been writing about in recent posts, it makes a lot more sense. The caller who confidently blamed “the hippies” was speaking from something quite beyond any narrow scientific, logical, technocratic, “reasonable” source.

If you take the view, as I do, that people are actually very intelligent and pick up everything, that people have a subconscious mind that is far more powerful than commonly acknowledged, then attributing the USA's supposed destruction to “the hippies” becomes much more understandable.

“The hippies” become, in this larger perspective, not just a very small number of colorful people who disappeared a half-century ago. They become all the people who pointed out that the USA has serious imperfections, a ghastly record in many respects, and not “exceptional” in this respect.

Rich people recently revived the use of “the hippies” to refer to the Occupy Wall Street protesters in just this way. The OWS people are obviously not “hippies,” but the term is a signifier for people who are pointing out a fundamental flaw in the USA that needs fixing. Rick and Bubba's caller and the rich people were using the phrase, “the hippies,” from a much larger perspective which involves very much from the unacknowledged subconscious.

Ronald Reagan and his supporters were only superficially successful, from this perspective, in sustaining such beliefs as “American exceptionalism” and the “nobility” of the Viet-Nam war. The USA, just like any other nation, has serious flaws, serious problems, and just like any other nation, those who point this out are going to be outcasts, considered to be enemies, scapegoated, and have projections hung on them by others who feel they have something to lose if the problems get addressed. The use of “the hippies” as the scapegoat also has the advantage that they were the vulnerable, the despised, the poor, the disrespected, despite the remarkable powers attributed to them.

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