In Dr. King's book entitled "The Trumpet of Conscience" from 1967 Dr, King talks about 3 groups of young people. The first group are those young people who are stugglin' and confused by the events of the 60's, the second group are the "radicals" and the third group, the "hippies"...

This is what Dr. King says about the hippies:

"The younh people in the third group are currently called 'hippies'. They may be traced in a fairly direct line from yesterday's beatniks. The hippies are not only colorful. but complex; and in mnay respects their extreme conduct illuminates the nefative effects of society's evils on sensitive young people. While there are variations, those who identify with this group have a common philosophy. They are struggling to disengage from society as their expression of their rejection of it. They disavow responsibility to organized society. Unlike the radicals, they are not seeking change but flight. When occasionally they merge with a peace demonstartion, it is not to better the political world, but to give expression of their own world. The hardcore hippie is a remarkable contridiction. He uses drugs to turn inward, away from reality, to find peace and security. Yet he advocates love as the highest human value- love, which can exist only in communication between people, and not in total isolation of the individual.

The importantance of the hippies is not in their unconventional behavior. but in the fact that some hundreds of thousands of young people, in turning to flight from reality, are expressing a profoundly discrediting judgement on the society thay emerge from.

It seems to me that the hippies will not last long as a mass group. They cannot survive because there is not solution in escape. Some of them may persist by solidifying into secular religious sect; their movement alrweady has many such characteristics. We might see some of them establish utopian colonies, like the seventeenth and wighteenth century communities established by sects that profoundly opposed the existing order and values. Those communities did not survive. But they were important to their contemporaries because their dream of social justice and human value continues as a dream of mankind.

In this context, one dream of the hippie group is very significant, and that is its dream of peace. Most of the hippies are pacifists, and a few have thought their way through to a persuasive and psychologically sophisticated 'peace stategy'. And society at learge may be more ready now to learn from their dream than it was a century ago, to listen to the argument for peace, not as a dream, but as a practical possibility: something to choose and use."

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Well, well, well...

After all these years of thinking I was an "old hippie" I find that, inspite of the bellbottoms, the sex, drugs and rock and roll, that I'm more an "old radical"...

Oh well????

B~