> I was only a young kid at the time, but
> I do remember the whole media frenzy
> that took place over the so-called
> "hippies." ...
Old joke: If you remember the sixties, you weren't there. I remember a lot of it.
The distinction between the New Left and hippies was nowhere near clear. Sure, there were important differences and "flower power" is not the same as "power to the people", but there were important commonalities too. Both groups were disgusted with much of Western civilisation, especially "Amerika" and its capitalist/imperialist system. The two groups overlapped heavily; it was less a question of which one you belonged to than where you were in a continuum bounded by the purer forms of those. Most of us were involved both in political action of various sorts and in attempts to change conciousness.
I'd be interested in hearing what people here think of John Perry Barlow's "declaration of the indepenence of cyberspace". You cannot get much more hippie-ish than being a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, but Barlow, like most of us, has gone on to other things. He was one of the founders of EFF (eff.org), a fairly important civil rights group. The declaration is at: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/cda/barlow-declaration.html
-- Sandy Harris, Quanzhou, Fujian, China