It’s that time of year when I’m left to remind everyone that the freedom to say whatever you want isn’t the freedom to think whatever you want. You might find chard a little too leafy for your otherwise hearty sensibilities. You might choose to protest a truck delivering crates of the stuff in the wee hours of the morning. Through your thick breath you spot bushel after bushel of this green monstrosity, unloaded and unloved. Destined for salad bars everywhere. Hate the farm, not the farmer. But the fact that your mind goes there – to a place of mistrust and paranoia is the problem. Kale warped many minds by waging a PR campaign unseen since the early days of Bieber.
Ideally, we should be raised to love what we don’t understand. That goes for everything. Except hippies, of course. Because if there’s one group that receives the wrath from a more diverse set of people it just might be these sandaled warriors of the counterculture. Has it ever occurred to them that you don’t have time to hear their acoustic opinion? You’re not ready to fold your face mask and transform it into a stylish bandana. Which potassium fanatics never fail to mention is only “one small ‘d’ away from being a banana.” Whatever that means.
Hippies aren’t here to inform you – not about current events. They want to talk about Nixon’s criminality, the V-2 rocket, or the Gulf of Tonkin incident. In their minds, they’re only a few weekends away from driving up the New York Thruway in a paper-thin VW bus for an outdoor concert on Max Yasgur’s farm. It’s all right in front of them. Flowers aren’t the only items stuck in their hair, caked in there after a religious-like commitment to not bathing. The not-so-great unwashed. They’re insisting you read Bukowski, grow a beard and start jogging. Claiming you can’t be truly alive unless you’re in an altered state of consciousness. And tie-dying is their solution to practically everything.
Peace? There’s an exception to every rule.
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