VIDEO: "Hippies" (2007)

Hi everyone,

The video below comes from the History Channel. It's a 90-minute documentary about hippie culture and the hippie movement - below is an interesting summary of the program, followed by the video - enjoy!

The Hippie movement was the most controversial and influential of modern times. Free love, the peace movement, drugs, Eastern religions and communes are explored. Meet the figures whose words and actions inspired it and destroyed it.

See how the vibrations from that era are still resonating today in almost every aspect of American life, from the clothes we wear, to the Personal Computer and the Internet. Finally, historic footage, stills and period graphics are interwoven with expert commentary and eyewitness testimony.

The 1960's and 1970's were a time of change, a time of revolution, a time of the Hippies. Hippies reached across the nation and their effects are still felt today.

I'm glad to see that they actually dug deeper than most newsreels of the time to research the individuals and groups that were an active part of the "hippie" rebellion movement.

Most clips of the time just show lots of flower-power children of the time smoking dope and dancing, then we're off to Woodstock, for the freaks and problems of drugs, violence, and overcrowding.

In this show, they research the individuals and groups that were involved, which is more than most reports did. Sure, drugs were involved, but also there was the rebellion factor; so many of the children watched their fathers work Mon-Fri, nine to five, and this ten years after the McCarthy hearings, the children were determined not to let a big government be completely in charge of their lives.

Probably also some anger over the Kennedy assassination, the Vietnam war, and later, the Kent State shootings (see Wikipedia.org for info). The show also points out that by the time the Beatles and more run-away hippies arrived, the original goal had disappeared.