Why I am proud to be called hippy…And i'm not a twat (most of the time)

I’ll start off with a couple of definitions of the word hippy, the first from the Free Online Dictionary, the second from the concise OED.

hippy¹, hippie [ˈhɪpɪ]

n pl -pies

a.  (esp during the 1960s) a person whose behaviour, dress, use of drugs, etc., implied a rejection of conventional values

b.  (as modifier) hippy language

hippy¹ (also hippie)

▶noun (pl. hippies) (especially in the 1960s) a young person associated with a subculture which rejected traditional social values, advocated peace and free love, and favoured long hair and unconventional dress.

The one thing that these both have in common is “Rejection” – rejection of Conventional Values, rejection of Traditional Social Values, and both imply a certain level of behaviour.

Why does this matter to me then? (and yet again, I’m coming out with the bloody rhetorical questions…I need to stop this, but how??)

Over the last few months, I’ve been having a regular friendly argument with one of my friends here in the lovely market town that I live in…Psycho chef calls me “bloody hippy who should be set on fire like all fucking hippies” I call him “psycho soulless ginger freak” – as you can see, it’s quite calm and sedate, also, I have noticed how on twitter, and multiple other interwebby places, hippy is used as a term of abuse for people.

At School I was called a hippy for various reasons, which I’ll explain in a bit, but it was used as a form of attempted bullying, like everything else that was used against me (see previous posts for a bit about the bullying I received at school.)

Anybody who ever says Sticks and Stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me, without a trace of irony, is a lying bar steward,  but hippy was one word that didn’t affect me in the slightest because I was proud of being a hippy!

As I have said previously, I was bought up in the deep dark depths of the Fens, and lived on what could be called a smallholding (where my family still live to this day).

The Constituency where the house is is deepest dark blue, until the 2010 elections, our MP was the tory grandee (and moat botherer) Douglas Hogg.

Until 1995 (my 2^nd year of secondary school) we were not on mains electric, we had a generator,  so, didn’t have tv etc etc coz it would have used far too much oil. We grew all our own fruit and vegetables, and had pigs and chickens – very very much like the good life in fact. Added to that, my incredibly bad fashion sense (ie none existence) and my overwhelming preference for longer hair, I got called a hippy because of all this.

It was so bad, that the only person from secondary school who I am still in regular contact with (and is the dad of my beautiful god daughter) is the only other lad in my year who got bullied coz his upbringing was roughly the same!

After I went to uni, and got kicked out, I grew my hair longer and longer, until it was long enough to sit on, started growing my own smokable products in the garden (it wasn’t very strong stuff, but homegrown always tastes better) and, started to wear what some people choose to call “hippy bead crap” but I prefer to call memories, on my wrists and neck.

In 2005, I spent the whole of the summer living in a tent on a beach on the south cornwall coast, no money, no work, food and alcohol gained through in raiding, but also many many scars on the wrists and neck.. Yes, I was a cutter, ended up in hospital on numerous occasions with life threatening bleeding. My wrists, my neck, and my upper legs were my cutting areas of choice. Upper legs can be covered easily,  writs and neck not so easily,  so I started wearing beads to cover them up. My cutting wasn’t for anybody else to see, no other bastard needed to know, it was purely a way of concentrating my head, and making me realise I was actually living.

The beads still exist, and still serve the same purpose.

I also believe in alternative therapy/medication, and meditation.  When I say alternative therapy/medication I do not mean Homeopathy…Homeopathy is one of the biggest rip offs of modern times, almost as bad as scientology in my view,  what I mean is traditional medicines, and therapies which help to connect your mind and body together again, again, helping to show that I am alive.

I use mediation, when I am able to, to try and empty my head of the weird, scary and downright fucked up thoughts that I regularly have, to try and make me feel more “normal” whatever that means!

I still feel at my absolute happiest when I am out with nature, with none of the modern world intruding onto what I do, and, if I could, I would be living in a smallholding, with no modern junk (apart from a computer and broadband, because I am not that prehistoric), growing my own food, and living off nature as humankind has done for the vast majority of its history. As long as I could also have shedloads of tea, alcohol and possibly smokeables.

To me, Hippy means somebody who lives with nature, and doesn’t fight against it. Somebody who isn’t completely wrapped up in the modern world to the exclusion of everything else. That is why I am actually proud to be a hippy. This is what I would know as rejecting “traditional” social values, as traditional is just a modern construct, as way to distance ourselves from the more “primitive” humans across the world, and to show that the “tradition” of  Western people is supposedly more advanced than those people who do still live with nature.

What hippy does not mean to me, is people like these http://t.co/I0v8soV ,other wannabe “New age” types and believers in Homeopathy.They are what I would know as absolute fucking Twats, and they deserve to be burnt alive.

From now on, if I see people, who I get on with, using hippy as a term of abuse, I am going to bite back, even if it is just directing them to here.

Phew, that’s got that one of my chest.  Now for a cuppa :D