Notes on Hippies, Ghosts and Pink Floyd

Mother, should I trust the government? Mother, should I build a wall?

For me Michigan has always had this bizarre dualism running through it... on the one hand, its got this history of counterculture and hippie-ness running through it, yet on the other hand, it's such a good school that we'll be able to win at the same game we love to hate. Why should we hate the system if it is set up in our favor? Are we hypocrites if we hang around Occupy Ann Arbor, but later go work on Wall Street?

I lamented the decline of hippies in Ann Arbor after sitting on the side of the highway from East Lansing for a couple hours, unable to get a one-hour ride back to Ann Arbor after the football game with thousands of fans making that drive (many already carpooling). I was disappointed in the city. I had always held out hope that maybe AA was still a hippie town in some sense, despite what is generally a lack of coherent activism on this campus anyways. I would have to think that if this place had any semblance of the 60s left in it, the local Occupy wouldn't have fizzled out like it did. Maybe Wolverines have collectively decided that we'd rather win at the system than destroy it anyways. Maybe we're not hypocrites anymore (?) and yet, it does kind of feel like something is lost in making that decision.

I'm kind of a case study myself in whether or not counterculture and the status quo are actually opposites in every sense; I consider myself to be a self-hating republican hippie. Republican in the sense that I don't think big government or high taxes do anybody any good, hippie in the sense that I think society needs to be as open and fair as possible, and that the most important thing society can do is foster an abundance mindset (which so many Republicans distinctly lack, which is why I kind of resent them and why I'm embarrassed to call myself Republican). Is that a defensible position? After all, isn't the idea of high taxes and wealth distribution founded in an abundance mindset? I don't think so, but at the same time I think that's for people smarter than me to figure out.

If that's true, maybe there is still hope for Ann Arbor. There's an old-school block-M logo on a cornhole board that lives on our wall in the apartment... I never really pay attention to it normally, but draws my attention as I sit listening to Pink and Led every once in a while. Something feels right about it, like this living nostalgia that carries on connecting present to past. Maybe there is something to be said for tradition? Ghosts of hippies past, perhaps, wandering this town from the Stairway to Heaven shop to little apartments where rock is played and self-hating hippies live. Too bad they can't give me a ride next time I need one.