Reply #15: I don't remember our calling ourselves anything [View All]

[frazzled]

Because (I suppose) of when and where I lived, it was the norm to be countercultural. Everybody of a certain age had long hair, wore "hippie" clothing, smoked pot (and, well, other stuff), listened in general to the same music, read Karl Marx and the I Ching, etc.

This was lower Manhattan in the late 60s. I think "hippie" was a little earlier and a little more West Coast. But we wouldn't have cringed at being called hippies--though I think we associated that term more with the Haight, communes, etc. We were all pretty much ersatz Hippies I guess ... it had entered the popular culture to such a degree that we were just "young people." It seemed normal to us, but we didn't quite want to go off and live on a commune.

Other people would have called us Hippies, however.