The Hippie Generation and the Beat Generation

Reading a bit about the Hippie generation that held us boys in thrall in school in the sixties and seventies. The Beat generation preceded the Hippies and Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg were the people who germinated the Hippie generation with their lives of carefree abandonment and spontaneous literature. Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady died young and Allen Ginsberg became the bridge to the new way of thinking and living marked by colour, free thought, free sex and free living. There were also bands involved such as Grateful Dead. In fact, one of Grateful dead's songs, "That's It for the Other One" became an anthem for the Hippies.

However, in the eighties some Hippies crossed over the consumerist culture and became thorough capitalists. Thereby ended the aspirations and dreams of a generation to change the world, which exists - still - in tiny pockets around the world.

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