October 10, 2000
Kamloops Daily News


I had been travelling outside of Canada for a year, and
living in England when I first heard of the hippies.  There
was lots of talk in 1966 about this new movement coming out
of California.  Something was happening, that was for sure. 
Young Londoners were strutting their stuff  in colourfully
patched jeans and beads.  The Beatles were doing their part.

The optimism of the hippie movement was palpable.  There was
a sense that if you just dropped out and turned on, a new
social order could be established.  The hippies  were high
on  human kindness and certain herbs. 

We were cool. No reason to get uptight.  We were going solve
the world's problems through love and peace.  Flower power
would prevail.  It was the dawning of the  age of Aquarius.

Back in Canada, the focus of the world was on Canada and
Expo 67. When I arrived  in Montreal, the mood of the
country was euphoric.  It was Canada's one-hundredth
birthday and it really did seem that the twentieth century
belonged  to us.

When Prime Minister Trudeau was elected the following year,
in 1968, his style matched the mood of the country.  He
seemed to embody anti-establishment hippie ideals.  The
flamboyant outfits, the irreverent attitude, the idealistic 
talk of justice -- it all fit into the new order.   Canada
was a country where exciting, cool things were happening.

Trudeaumania swept the country.  It didn't seem unusual at
all that he was being greeted as a pop star.  The universe
was unfolding as it should.  Trudeau was like no other
politician.  He was an outsider who came to politics to
claim the country for the Canadians.

The meeting of Trudeau with John Lennon and Yoko Ono in
Montreal was a hippie summit.  When John and Yoko held their
"bed-in" in a Montreal hotel and they  sang "give peace a
chance" I thought, why not?  We had been giving war a chance
for long enough.

But Trudeau was no hippie, as we saw during his
implementation of the  War Measures Act in November, 1970.  
Flowers thrown in front of the tanks that rumbled through
Montreal would have been crushed.  The hippie was just one
of Trudeau's incarnations, along with the Gunslinger and the
Philosopher King.   He governed with an iron hand and became
what Canada needed most for those turbulent times.  -- a
forceful Prime Minister with a clear vision of Canada.

The problem with the hippie movement was that although it
had fuzzy, warm intentions, there was no plan, no prominent 
voice.  Unlike the beatniks, who had poet-leaders like Jack
Kerouac, the hippie movement was leaderless.  Rock stars
sang about hippie ideals but most of them burnt out quickly.

John Lennon sank into a drug stupor from which he would not
awaken from for more than decade.  He re-emerged only to be
shot to death by Mark Chapman, a former mental patient. 
Other musicians who had inspired the hippies died from drug
overdoses.  The hippie ideals of love, peace, and cosmic
consciousness through chemicals, were soon replaced by the
philistine rant of  sex, drugs and rock-and-roll. 

The hippie movement was an example of what happens when
earnest reformers try to eliminate too much social order.
"When starting from zero, they jettison basic social
practices and institutions, abandon common routines, and
defy common sense, reason, conventional wisdom--and,
sometimes, sanity itself", says writer Christina Hoff
Sommers.

The hippie movement was not a complete bust.  The spiritual
children of the hippies are leading a movement so new that
it has yet to be named.  They are raising new global
consciousness with demonstrations against the World Trade
Organization and World Bank.  Maybe the new counterculture
will have learned from the self-destructive hippie movement. 
Maybe they rise phoenix-like from the ashes of the old
movement. 

The euphoria of the late 1960's didn't last long, but for a
while I naively thought that the ideals of brotherhood and
peace could really change the world.  Now, in sad
reflection, it all seems quaint and anachronistic.  History
will prove Trudeau's legacy to be much more durable -- the
man stands tall above the nostalgia.

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