The Counterculture Movement: The Hippie Movement

After the Vietnam War, Americans were not as trusting of the government as they once were because of the ‘gap’ of information between the American people and the information the government had about the war. So, many young people in the 1960s began to rebel against society by rejecting traditional values. The primary practitioners of this counterculture movement were called hippies and were mainly a group of white children from affluent families. They rejected the culture because they thought it was too unjust, restrictive and boring.
Hippies were a part of a long tradition of cultural demurring that goes back to the beatniks from the 1950s and the bohemians. But behind the hip and beat cultures was the black American culture. Some hippies like the laid back and withdrawn approach to the current culture, but others took a more active stance against the current society. The counterculture had a separatist minority which thought that there …show more content…
I learned that there were two unique approaches to the alternative culture. One way was that of the New Lefts (the people who were overtly political opposition to the standard culture) and that of the hippidoms (the dropouts and rebels of culture). I also learned that there were three divisions in the counter cultural movement: the New Left, the Underground, and the “militant poor”. The New lefts were the radical, political, protestors. The Undergrounds were the true “hippies”, “crazies” and “crack pots”. The militant poor people where the ones who participated in ethnic revolutions.
I also learned that there was more to drugs then just getting high. I always thought they did it just for fun but they actually used it to try to expand their minds and alter their consciousness in order to find the meaning of life. I also learned that most stayed away from drugs they could get addicted too.
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