Birth Of The Flower Children

When you are travelling to the breathtaking mountains or beautiful beaches, you might come across groups of people wearing floral clothes often listening to music and chilling. Although these are the telltale signs to identify Hippies, they are not only about psychedelia and colourful clothes. The concept of Flower Power also emerged as a passive resistance to the Vietnam War during the late 1960s.

The history behind the Hippie Culture is full of struggle for spreading peace and love. Let’s see how the Hippie Movement came into being and changed the world’s perception of hippies and psychedelic culture.

The Hippie Culture Preached 5 Things:

1. A Peaceful and Tolerant World
2. Equal Civil and Social Rights For All
3. Elimination of the Vietnam War
4. Spreading Use of Psychedelics
5. Questioning the Materialistic Attitude of People

People especially youngsters turned to the Hippie Culture as a form of revolt towards people’s notion about getting a mundane job, have a house, a car and live a simple life. The Hippie culture embraced people’s differences and made them feel more accepted, made them feel like a part of something bigger.

The Beat Generation was a rather important and scandalous group of writers and poets who wrote several  write ups encouraging the use of psychedelics. The hippie groups like Merry Pranksters introduced a new age of psychedelia. They took epic road trips and travelled in a brightly colored school bus while ingesting large amounts of LSD, which was legal until 1965. The group traveled the nation, housed famous parties, gave out large quantities of LSD and helped define the long hair and bizarre fashion that came to symbolize the American hippies. 

During the Vietnam War, hippies showed their silent revolt against war by roaming the streets in colourful clothes and flowers in their hands. Some were seen putting flowers inside the barrels of guns pointed at them and some making flower chains. The most important moment in the Hippie Movement was on October 21st, 1967. 100,000 people gathered together to march down the Pentagon in an attempt to levitate it. They were faced with 2,500 soldiers and the revolt lasted for three days before order could be restored. This season of summer is probably the most famous summer known in history, also known as the ‘Summer of Love’ .

Originally billed as ‘An Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace & Music,’ the Woodstock Music & Art Fair was a four-day festival comprised of 400,000 people on a dairy farm in rural New York State. This festival was controversial to the point of getting cancelled. Jimi Hendrix’s famous psychedelic performance of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ became one of the most famous moments of the entire festival and made a serious impact on the Hippie movement. 

So now you know the years of struggle for peace and acceptance that the hippie culture stands for and we hope it broadened your perceptions of the psychedelic community.