Assignment: Ukiah - When the last old hippie dies - Ukiah Daily ...

Any one of us, when in a relaxed and cheerful frame of mind, might close our eyes and imagine a world free from baby boomers. These are joyful and uplifting thoughts, certain to bring a sense of peace and optimism when they well up within our bosoms.

And it isn't mere wishful thinking, because some sweet day the time will come when there are no more baby boomers alive on the planet.

Yes, a distant dawn will break and the last old hippie will wheeze his final sour exhalation and drift off to whatever awaits in the misty and unknowable beyond. A nurse will turn off the Grateful Dead music, wipe the dried granola flakes from his lips and burn the tie-dye sheets. Next she'll call Waste Management to come fetch the desiccated old husk. The world will at last be free. No more will musty old boomer slogans and moronic beliefs be bandied about, conveyed as if they had meaning and value.

Because they meant nothing. You could distill all the wisdom of the baby boomer generation into a few na?ve and ignorant paragraphs. Their promises to change the world were laughable. Their legacy? (A) the Disco Era, (B) a huge spike in drug use and (C) the shredding of the intact American family. Also hippies once gathered in cities to break windows and set fire to stuff to prove they loved peace.

That's not all. The shriveled and withered hippie crowd contributed nothing intellectually or culturally. You will search libraries and museums in vain if looking to find a great book or

lasting piece of art created in the last 40 years.

But in addition to bringing to a merciful close the intellectual prattle of the tiny little minds that made up the great thinkers of the Love Generation, some other things will also be dead and gone forever:

All the beatnik literary rubbish spawned by talentless half-wits like Alan Ginsburg or Jack Kerouac or Lawrence Ferlinghetti will be cleared from bookshelves.

JFK will be viewed as nothing more than another flawed, minor President.

Books such as To Kill a Mockingbird and Catcher in the Rye will no longer be on the lists of must-read material for teenagers. Without the 60s generation to tend to the embers, interest in them will quickly cool to ash.

Peace poles, Nuke-Free Zones and Tibetan Peace Flags will be extinct.

The world will finally see the last of all those endless Hollywood and Broadway remakes of childish comic book heroes like Spiderman and Superman and Peter Pan and Batman. Nostalgia won't be what it is now.

All the petty racketeers making a living outwitting the feebleminded and credulous via scams like yoga, therapy, and a hundred other fads will go out of business. No one but an elderly boomer could ever believe that a better world will come about through gurus and horoscopes.

Woody Allen, Marilyn Monroe, Princess Di, and a million other media celebrities will be ignored.

(But maybe. if we wish and hope and pray, Paris Hilton, Ed McMahon and the Spice Girls will live in our memories forever. . . )

The long, debilitating drain on the nation's economy will be over once our Social Security system recovers from the looting hordes now sponging it up. Those who spent a few years contributing $40 a month to Social Security are now grubbing out $1,800 a month. The Gravy Train Generation can't be exterminated fast enough. If you're under 50 you should be outraged at having to pay for 30 years of freebies for freeloaders.

"Classic" cars like the '57 Chevy and '64 GTO will no longer be worshiped.

The Beatles will be rightly regarded as simply a peculiar musical curiosity, certainly unworthy of the deity status they now enjoy. They won't just be considered overrated; they'll be irrelevant and forgotten. Ditto all the rest of the teen beat music of the era.

(But maybe, if we wish and hope and pray, Herman's Hermits, Lesley Gore and Milli Vanilli will live in our memories forever . . .)

Bumperstickers telling people how to think, as in "Question Authority!" and "Practice Random Acts of Violence" will have gone the way of anvils, carbon paper, tie-dye shirts and floppy disks.

Those dreary events that are supposedly designed to make a better world by "raising consciousness" or "building awareness" will exist no more. Say goodbye to marathon-type events with names like "The Human Race" and "Run for the Money" and "Race for the Cure."

I know it's a long shot but I know the time will come when we will be safe to attend weddings, funerals and Broadway productions without seeing boomers dressed in T-shirts and jammie bottoms.

Dogs will no longer be considered fashion accessories or members of the immediate family.

Tom Hine, a baby boomer, lives in Ukiah and writes under the TWK byline.

Source: http://www.ukiahdailyjournal.com/editorial/ci_21502382/assignment-ukiah-when-last-old-hippie-dies?source=rss

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