Not to belabor a point, but I was there, during the 60's. It was a fun time to be alive. If I've got my facts straight, Hippie derived from Hipster, which was a kind of label for reefer smoking, jazz loving, artistic beatnick types of the 50's and early 60's. Abbie Hoffman tried to capitalize on the word by, according to himself, starting up the Youth International Party, or Yippies. Hippie was basically an insulting term picked up by the media and used to describe the counter culture scene, as if one label could be slapped on everybody who wasn't at all like Mr. & Mrs. Leave it to Beaver. A sort of rennaisance was happening, and I don't recall anyone who voluntarily called himself/herself a hippie, because, of course, we were all so individualistic, and knew that labels were a tool of the evil Military/Industrial Complex Conspiracy . At the risk of drawing fire, the only ones who were comfortable being called hippies, as I recall, were losers who would have been happy to be included in any recognizable category, as they weren't very good at having identities of their own.

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