Word: youthful
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...ways: the agape-like sharing of food and shelter by total strangers: the lack of overt hostility despite conditions that were ripe for panic and chaos; the altruistic ministrations of the Hog Farm, a New Mexico hippie commune who took care of kids on bad trips. If Bethel was youth on a holiday, it was also a demonstration to the adult world that young people could create a kind of peace in a situation where none should have existed, and that they followed a mysterious inner code of law and order infinitely different from the kind envisioned by Chicago...
...Youth's sense of community is an ad hoc thing: it is suspicious of institutions and wary of organization, prizing freedom above system. In this, as in many other ways, the youth of Bethel displayed adherence to the prevailing spirit of the hippie movement. It is true enough that the manifestation of flower power in Haight-Ashbury and the East Village became a bad scene of gang rapes, deaths from malnutrition and too much speed. It is equally true that most of those at Bethel were not hippies in the commonly accepted sense: a good half of them, at least...
...accepted. The pleasure principle has been elevated over the Puritan ethic of work. To do one's own thing is a greater duty than to be a useful citizen. Personal freedom in the midst of squalor is more liberating than social conformity with the trappings of wealth. Now that youth takes abundance for granted, it can afford to reject materialism...
...Youth has always been rebellious. What makes the generation of the '60s different, is that it is largely inner-directed and uncontrolled by adult doyens. The rock festival, an art form and social structure unique to the time, is a good example. "They are not mimicking something done in its purest form by adults," says one prominent U.S. sociologist. "They are doing their own thing. All this shows that there is a breakdown in the capacity of adult leaders to capture the young." Some other observers agree that the youth movement is a politics without a statesman, a religion without...
...able to speak to the Now Generation in language that it heard and heeded. Clearly, the passions of the Bethel people are there to be exploited, for good or ill. It is an open question whether some as yet unknown politician could exploit the deep emotions of today's youth to build a politics of ecstasy...