Reply #56: Go read [View All]

[mudplanet]

The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, On The Road, Been Down So Long Seems Like Up To Me,

and you still won't know what a hippy was (but you'll have spent some quality time with quality books), because there wasn't any such thing. It's like asking, "What was wrong with Christians?" or, What was wrong with Mexicans? Like you can define any large group monolithically (look, Ma, I'm inventing language).

You could also read the story that comprised the margins of the original Whole Earth Catalogue. That was pretty good. I wish I could find a copy.

I was a wanna be, probably because I began to sense at an early age that I was being lied to wholesale and I ceased believing virtually anything I was being taught at school and in the media. Smoke marijuana and you'll become a heroin addict? Take LSD and you'll jump off a twelve story building (I was actually told that by a judge)? If we don't murder three million more Vietnamese people the whole of Asia will become a Stalinistic gulag? I am not a crook? Unmarried sex is shameful and degenerate? Having my hair cut short and wearing a belt and socks are essential if I am to learn anything in school, otherwise I'll become a garbageman (apparently that was the worst fate they could think of, because I think I was threatened with it a dozen times).

I'll give the Brothers of the Sacred Heart one thing though - they taught us the truth about STDs. I was subjected to a day long seminar, including films and question and answer periods in which sex and the human body was talked about frankly and truthfully. Forty years later I found myself in discussions with adult women that knew less about female anatomy than I did.

Of course, as soon as I discovered that you could avoid pregnancy and STD's by using condoms I immediately took that as license for promiscuity! It's a good thing there weren't any gay people around to recruit me or I'd be a degenerate homosexual today.