Ends and Odds: The Ravings of An Old man by Dave Jaffe. Part One of 'Two Chhers For The Hippies.

    Two Cheers For The Hippies' by Dave Jaffe. Part One.






              In 1967, journalist Jack Newfield wrote a story on the hippies that appeared in 'The Nation' magazine. "Two cheers for the hippies" wrote Newfield, who was a left leaning journalist. Back then he was a regular writer for the alternative New York based paper 'The Village Voice'.
     Newfield liked the lifestyle of the hippies. He was glad that these mostly young people had cast off the trappings of the middle class. Yet he couldn't endorse their contempt for political issues. Back in 1967 in the United States, African Americans struggled for social justice. Young American men were being drafted into the U.S. armed forces and then shipped off to fight, kill and die in Vietnam.
     An American anti-war movement was urging young American men to defy the draft. "Women should say yes to men who say no," said folksinger Joan Baez. The hippies rarely joined political demos. Tens of thousands of young hippies dropped out of suburbia - at least for a time. They swarmed into places like San Francisco's Haight Ashberry district, Yorkville in Toronto, New York City's East Village and the Kitsilano area of  Vancouver. Here they crashed or lived in what they called "pads". They smoked marijuana, and took L.S.D. or Lysergic Acid Diethylamide, which they soon called "acid". They let their hair grow long and dressed in colourful clothes. They scorned the working majority that they called "straights".
      "Tune in, turn on and drop out," said one of the chief advocates of dropping  out and  taking L.S.D., namely Timothy Leary. Jerry Rubin back then, was a young uptight left leaning politico. Rubin was a post graduate student at the university of California in Berkeley. Berkeley sat right across the San Francisco bay from Haight Ashberry. "In the midsixties," Rubin recalled, "came the emergence of the hippies, dropping out of school, getting high on grass and acid, communicating with God and creating a new lifestyle."
    Rubin scorned liberals like Jack Newfield but the hippies impressed him. He joined them at their grand gatherings called 'Be Ins". Rubin then moved to New York City to start a new revolutionary group called "yippies". Yippes fused the hippie life style with revolutionary politics.