Subject: Why All The Hippies Morphed Into Campus Fascists

How the flower people transformed our universities and colleges into the most rigid, closed-minded, repressive, unthinking sort of society.

I recall a photograph, taken in the late 1960s or early ’70s, during some sort of protest (it could have been anywhere, about pretty much anything, given the high level of unrest). A rank of soldiers stood in full combat gear, rifle barrels pointed straight up in front of their faces. They were at attention, with firm expressions, eyes forward. A slim, beautiful hippie chick faced one of the soldiers and was sliding the stem of a daisy down the barrel of his gun. She had been working her way down the rank, performing the same gesture with each soldier’s rifle, as they stood fast without reaction.

I was a member of her tribe back then: a peace-loving, pot-smoking, long-haired hippie revolutionary. I was age 17 or so, and still in high school in a small Midwestern town. It was “Revolutionary Lite,” as advertising might put it today. The photo summed up much of what we counterculture visionaries believed: Give Peace a Chance; Make Love, Not War; the Age of Aquarius. . . .

The girl’s tender, innocent gesture seemed so powerful when deployed against the intimidating might of the soldiers. She was the face of our fight against the rigidity and repression of society’s Judeo-Christian morality, looming military-industrial complex, tight-sphinctered, hawkish, unimaginative conservative leaders, and the greedy fat cats who secretly ran the whole mess while enriching themselves.

Underpinning the whole protest movement was a wholesale rejection of stifling, repressive (we thought), unthinking (we decided), pro forma middle-class morality. We intended to shake the rigid framework of establishment conformity, pull it down to rubble and lay claim to our right to unbridled self-expression and guilt-free sex. While we were at it, we would free people of color, end racism and poverty, and liberate women from the forced sexual slavery of the obsolete, patriarchal institution of marriage.

We had opened our minds to ideas our parents were incapable of grasping, too square to accept. We were going to unleash a wave of drug-fueled creativity unseen in human history, generously slathered with Harmony and Understanding, according to a song from a popular Broadway play featuring gratuitous nudity.

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