The Vietnam War Protests: The Hippie Movement

The war in Vietnam and opposition to it by the students of America, further worked to separate the countercultural generation from the values and ideals of their parents and the government, who stood as symbols of hypocrisy in the eyes of youth. This atmosphere of united protest against the war by the youth, as well as the increasing generation gap, ultimately gave rise to another complex form of the counter culture, the hippies. The hippies who were “Largely white, middle class, and educated…” , according to the St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, “… whipped up their own philosophy of natural living, easy sexual and social relations, sincerity, and hedonism…”, adapting beat values of drug use for opening the mind, relaxed attitudes

According to The History Channel’s website, in an article titled, “Vietnam War Protests”, those speaking out against the war, as early as 1965 included , “…members of the hippie movement, a growing number of young people who rejected authority and embraced the drug culture”, effectively showing the early relationship that hippies had to the movement. This is illustrated again, even more effectively, in the words of Ryan J. Kirkby, who states in “Dramatic Protests, Creative Communities” that, “Within the counterculture’s more politically attuned segments, a shared rejection of top-down authority, nevertheless, united the disparate collection of rebels…[assuming] a variety of forms in the 1960s and 1970s from psychedelic drug use…to experiments in communal living”, showing that the antiwar movement and the united voice in protest of the Vietnam Conflict ultimately united all forms of the growing counter culture, resulting in a consolidation of ideas and values, that allowed for the growth and origin of all things Hippie (Ryan J.

Public opinion began to shift even further away from support for the movement, and the idealism and utopian values of the participants soon became corrupted. This ultimate and sudden fade back into obscurity of the hippie counterculture, as well as their values, can perhaps be blamed on a variety of unfortunate events, each cataclysmic in disrupting countercultural values and activities. These events include the ultimate failure of large scale festivals and gatherings, the string of murders conducted by Charles Manson, and the suppression of dissent and peaceful protest by law enforcement. Despite the initial success of wide spread gatherings, which expressed hippie culture and music, such as the Monterey Pop Festival, and Woodstock, later gatherings resulted in wide spread violence, human exploitation, and death. The problems associated with these gatherings are effectively portrayed through the commentary of Thomas Kitts, as he describes and analyzes the gatherings through historical evidence, as well as footage from documentaries on Woodstock, Monterey Pop, and other gatherings….These scenes ultimately result in a break from countercultural values of peace and cooperation, as the mass amount of people attending, combined