I think it's safe to say that we've all heard of hipsters. Most of us have learned to hate them. Many hipsters don't even realize that it's what they are. In truth a hipster would never admit to being a hipster, but I think we are all a little bit hipster sometimes. I honestly don't see TRUE hipsters that often. But you might not see most of them for what they were unless you tried to talk to them. Irony, ironically is a big theme in this post and not just because hipsters think that everything they do is ironic. It's an Irony Inception!... Fuck Hipsters... you ain't ironic... you're pointless... you're like vain Muppets but without a billion dollar franchise!!! Ok... that was my little outburst, and now I'm gonna try to be rational.
The most common opinion that seems to be held by hipsters is that they're better than others because of what they are doing. And this can be said of most extreme views. The general consensus is that hipsters are undisciplined, immature, and childish in their actions. If hipsters are childish, it means that they are selfish and ignorant which means that they're susceptible to hate which results in conflict. I think hipsters were born out of misguided messages being confused by the human instinct to compete.
It's kind of ironic that many hipsters dress and try to act so much like the hippies. Our generation was the one to spawn the hipster, with their selfishness and hate, and yet our elders constantly hammered us over and over with the idea that everyone is equal. Many of us were the children of hippies and the baby-boomer generation. It's easy to see that most of our elders are people who lived and grew up in the 60s. Whether they like it or not, most of our elders were impacted in a major way by the ideals of the hippies. The 60s were all about the hippies! Color TV was getting big and the country was evolving a whole lot. Capitalism was in full swing and mass media as we know it today was still coming into it's own.
One result of the hippies, the 60s, and the evolution of mass media was the refinement and implementation of public broadcasting in America, climaxing with the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967. In 1968 a show came on the air known as Mr Rodgers Neighborhood. Fred Rodgers, a man sometimes blamed for the problems of our generation, was sort of a hippie himself. He was an educator, a song writer, an author, and a minister. On his show he taught all about peace and love, but he also taught that we are all special. "Everybody is special" is not originally Mr Rodgers' idea, and it's romantic nature has held a lot of appeal for some time. But, as we all know, the hipsters love to be special. Some think that the idea spawned an entire generation who feels a sense of entitlement, but this can't be true.
In my opinion, children develop personalities based on the mistakes that were made by their role models being compared to the ideals that said role-models impressed onto them. This would explain why every generation came out more effed up than the last! It's really confusing when something like, "Love, peace and equality are the key to happiness!" is what our role models are teaching us while they are also telling us that we're special and while they themselves are guilty of hate and ignorance! But I believe that there are extremes in all aspects of society, and hipsters are just one of them. The reasons that we have hipsters are very complicated and can't be simplified by a few sentences, but lets just remember that they're, for the most part, harmless. If we didn't have them, we wouldn't have much to poke fun at. Our generation would just seem sad and under-developed. Unfortunately, for our elders more than anything, human nature is just too powerful to overcome with flowers and protest rallies.
Woodstock was said to be the hippies' big "told you so", and nobody can deny that it really helped their cause. But every attempt to recreate a similar event has failed. Maybe what Woodstock really taught us was that you need loud music and lots of drugs in order to ignore the stupid shit around you and just get on with living. A lot of our generation has adopted a life style based around this and maybe they're not all wrong, but drugs and loud music can't solve everything. To many, drugs are the cause of most major problems. Maybe the problems caused by drugs are just extremes, and again, there are always extremes in any situation. But drugs seem do a whole lot that throws any sort of balance out the window. These extremes have created gateways for a lot of hate, whether it's founded or not. But because many drugs were so new and unstudied when the hippies started experimenting with them, people who hate the hippies have a lot of concrete evidence against them. More evidence than those of us who hate our hipsters.
...And good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding - ALBERT CAMUS, The Plague
Ever since the 60s, the idea has been going around that the hippies failed. Many think that their ideas were ill-founded or childish. Obviously anyone who seriously thought that anarchy was a legitimate option for society was misguided. But as the hippies grew up, settled down, and learned some discipline with experience, they didn't necessarily grow out of their ideals. If you look around you'll find hippie ideals in almost every form of media. How ironic that hippies were anti-establishment and anti-big-business and yet the establishments of corporate media have adopted "peace, love and happiness" as the ideal message to send to their audiences. The fact that our generation is practically being saturated by media, marketing, and mixed messages isn't really proving to be helpful to our growth and development. And this is why I feel that the combination of any or all of these problems explains why we have hipsters.
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