(no subject)
There's a problem with opening your act to the gutter. I mean, its like dabbling in Satanism, or experimenting in certain life-styles, or certain types of drugs, that open you up - I mean, I'm not a religious person, but you open up that crack, it can get to you. So you have to be careful.
The problem with the hippies was that there developed a hostility within the counterculture itself, between those who has like the equivalent of a trust fund versus those who had to live by their wits. Its true, for instance, that blacks were somewhat resentful of the hippies by the Summer of Love, 1967, because their perception was that these kids were drawing paisley swirls on the Sam Flax writing pads, burning incense, and taking acid, but those kids could get out of there any time they wanted to.
They could go back home. They could call their mom and say. "Get me outta here." Whereas someone who was raised in a project on Columbia Street and was hanging out on the edge of Tompkins Square Park can't escape. Those kids don't have any place to go. They can’t go back to Great Neck, they can’t go back to Connecticut. They can’t go back to boarding school in Baltimore. They're trapped.
So there developed another kind, more of a lumpen hippie, who really came from an abused childhood -- from parents that hated them, from parents that threw them out. Maybe they came from a religious family that would call them sluts or say 'You had an abortion, get out of here' or 'I found birth control pills in your purse, get out of here, or go away.' And those kids fermented into a kind of hostile street person. Punk types." -Ed Sanders
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