Were You A Hippie?

I don't know, it just happened. Today has been this heart-breakingly beautiful, nicely warm, sunny, blue-sky day. What was I doing? I spent the entire afternoon in my galley kitchen baking and cooking. It's a puzzle isn't it? I can't explain that but I did trip over some interesting things while I was bumping in to myself in that tiny space making oatmeal cookies and miso soup.

I'm not a big cookbook fan anymore. I used to be but somewhere along the road I gave away all my old cookbooks with the exception of an old chestnut from the 70's titled The Vegetarian Family. The cover has a drawing of this impossibly happy couple with their two boys. The Dad has longish hair with a great handlebar mustache and Mom has long blonde hair parted right down the middle. Flared jeans make sure we wouldn't mistake them for some other decade. The recipes are wonderful and wholesome. Few ingredients but prepared with an elegant simplicity that begs trial. I hadn't cracked open this cookbook for years. For some reason today it practically fell off the shelf. As of tonight we are stocked with plenty of miso soup, a miso spread for the cornbread/rye muffins, the cornbread and the oatmeal/flax cookies. Wow.

Hippie life was never mine. Andy opted for the Air Force before the Army got him in 1969 so military life was the choice we made or it was made for us. We did spend eleven years in Sacramento, California, an experience I will not ever forget and which shaped both of us in the most subtle of ways. After all the years back in Wisconsin, I would call California my second home. While Andy was off flying or shuttling back and forth to South East Asia, I was mostly stateside and got to drop in on the beach parties with my cousins in Santa Cruz and sometimes dress like I was one of the group. It was a great time, much better when Andy came home for good. We roamed up and down the Coast camping on the beaches and wandering in to little communities for wine and cheese and late nights. For all that he was in the military, on weekends we took off and couldn't be found.

Were you a hippie? This past winter as the protests and street chants ramped up in Madison, one of the first things I heard was the supposedly derogatory comment that in all reality the protestors were just a bunch of old hippies. It's a reference of course to the street protests back in the 60's and 70's over the Vietnam War. To be fair and historical, that protest movement was indeed responsible for ending that war. But the two Scotts - Walker and Fitzgerald - meant that as a slam, a put down, an ageist sneer. I suppose they have never tried miso soup and whole grain muffins.

Perhaps the best of whatever the hippie thing was ended up being the back-to-the-land effort (some of which is still alive and active and something we are needing to do in earnest again), the anti-war protests which called the country to accountability, and the intentional knowledge that government could be done differently in order to support The Common People. Those among us at that time who were not sucked in to the war wanted government to be responsive not reactive. Sure, we were young, wanted some fun, wanted less restrictions, wanted not to die in a war far from home for something we couldn't understand and our parents couldn't explain. But we also wanted to regain some lost ground, we wanted to energize the process, make it resilient, for The People, be hopeful that big money wasn't poised to take over the majority position in politics. We had graduated high school and college having learned the lessons of democracy from books and professors and we, like all youth, had a hopeful understanding of it. We wanted it to work.

So what if some of us were hippies? Maybe we were more realistically idealists whose fervor for politics that challenged the status quo was a healthy thing. Perhaps our energy for pushing the boundaries just got dumped into the same bin as our music - that also challenged the parents generation. I'm not whining. I'm too old to whine about that but age has given me some perspective. Revolution by the young is often the only way the revolution will happen. I personally believe we are in need of one again. Our government is overflowing with corporate money, greed and sneaky politicos who have an alarming agenda. It's not one that will benefit The Common People. On February 11th it wasn't the old hippies who first poured out in to the streets of Madison, it was the youth. The Scotts were wrong about that. I wish it had been us, you and me, the retired and still working hippies and hippie wanna bes. But it was the young people who quickly said it would not stand to have their teachers stripped of their bargaining rights. Very good for them. Life is a circle - all of us are needed.

If you were a hippie, I admire you and sometime would love to hear your story. We ought to tell those. I'm pretty sure they'd make great campfire tales. In the meantime, see you in the streets. I'll bring the whole grain muffins, the miso soup in a thermos and a sign to carry. Like the old days!

Power To All The People!