09 Mar '18 08:12

Originally posted by @wolfe63
The big disappointment for me was how quickly the "hippies" sold-out to the "greed is good" movement of the 1980's.

I am demographically a "Baby-boomer" having been born in 1963...but I've always aligned myself with the philosophies of those whom suffered the Great Depression as adults (Great War Generation).

Sadly, they're all gone now...and most h ...[text shortened]... ohibition, and how it was to suffer without complaint during hardships...will always inspire me.

One generational group often rebels against the values of the previous one. It is a normal maturation process. Even Socrates complained that the youth of his day were rude and undisciplined.

My wife's mother was a child during the Nazi period in Germany and lived through hell. That generation had to rebuild a shattered country and confront some very tough questions about the collective conscience and collective responsibility for atrocities they did not themselves commit but which they witnessed. What do we see in Germany today? The rebellious youth choose exactly what would be most abhorrent to their elders: neo-Nazism. I don't think today's so-called neo-Nazis would have liked or even survived in Hitler's regime. Today's youth are too pampered and decadent and lazy for that; they only pose themselves as Nazis to be as repellent as possible.

I too am a child of the post-war baby boom in America; heard the Grateful Dead, Led Zep, Allman Bros. etc. live in San Francisco as a teenager. Very anti-authoritarian, pacifist, vegetarian, etc. My parents' generation married almost always as virgins; in my generation, almost no one married as a virgin (if they married at all, rather than 'co-habiting' ). This must have seemed very licentious to my parents' generation.

Now, here's the twist: in the next generation, after the hippie generation, what do the rebellious youth do? I have a dear friend, an old hippie now, like me, very anti-authoritarian, vegetarian, New Age Buddhist, ringing-brass-bowl therapy, the whole 9-yards. He raised his daughter in that anti-authoritarian, tie-dye, unstructured hippie world and when she moved out of her father's house as a teenager, she converted to Roman Cathlocism! HaHaHa.

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