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In Reply to: Re: That's sad/bad...that's good (relative) posted by Skep on January 15, 2010 at 13:20:33:
I agree with you on how lame it is, as you say, "TFI leaders are now changing history by blaming that behavior on the poor teenagers who never had power, say or even the freedom to do anything like that in those days."
But on the subject of hippies and early Family recruits, I think there were more than just a few real hippies who joined in the early days. I for sure was one of them.
I joined in '71, and had been a part of the psychedellic drug sub-culture for 4 years since 1967. My hippy 'credentials' are bona fida, i.e.: I had moved to Vermont to go to college in '67. I first smoked weed when I went to Harlem at Thanksgiving ('67) with a new New York friend from school to buy a lid from a guy named the Indian. In fact my friend had just spent the summer with the Greenwich Village Diggers (an underground theater group that opened free stores, started in San Francisco). Soon I wasn't going to classes anymore. I'll never forget the Boston Common in '68, or hanging out in places like Franconia and Goddard. Those years I was mostly East Coast. After when I wasn't able to stay in school any longer in Vermont I moved to Austin and where I was one of many barefoot hippies when I joined the Family '71. I'm sure I would not have joined unless there were other real hippies in the group. It's true that there were a lot of teenagers who were hippy to a certain extent, and I remember trying to figure out how some of my hippy friends managed to stay in university, while there were others like me who ended up too spaced out to study. In human society there are always degrees of integration regarding new trends and/or movements.
About Faithy: I knew her back then too, but I never considered her to be a hippy.
