I remember studying the Vietnam War in high school and being so jealous of my parents for living through that time. It wasn’t the fighting I wanted, it was being part of a passionate generation. While the kids of the sixties and seventies spent hours rallying and organizing, my generation is so lazy that desperate politicians have actually made it possible to register to vote through a text message.

I mean, COME ON.

But then we went to war and I realized that even with a cause, the majority of my generation is just too lazy to become impassioned.

During Vietnam, about twenty GI Coffeehouses sprung up around the country, serving as a place for off-duty soldiers to hang out, listen to music, and become politically active. This past weekend, I was lucky enough to attend a show at the Iraq-era’s first GI Coffeehouse in Watertown, NY, home of the Fort Drum Army Base.

The event was a send-off party for a group of soldiers about to deploy, including “Andy.” Andy is an unassuming punk kid who you might bump into at Higher Ground and not give a second thought to. He wears chucks, studded belts, and Fat Wreck T-shirts. He smokes Camel Lights and drinks whatever you’ll buy for him. After all, he’s underage.

He’s also a medic responsible for the wellbeing of twenty men in Iraq.

Andy is a soldier about to serve his duty, but he still cheered louder than anyone else in the room when Baltimore-based folk singer Ryan Harvey sang “Cuz in year one Bush declared victory / In two and three the casualties increased / In year number four it grew into a civil war / In year five I will make sure we leave / In year five I’ll make sure we leave.”

The whole event got me thinking: Why isn’t my generation more passionate? Why aren’t there more singers like Ryan, pouring their hearts into songs inspired by the war stories of young men like Andy? I mean sure, we rock against Bush and all, but lyrics like Ryan’s — which can all be read here — are a throwback to a time when anti-war lyrics were the only lyrics. When protesting wasn’t just some screamo band setting one track aside to say that “war sucks.” When musicians literally dedicated their careers to making change through music.

Working hand in hand with Ryan on a recent project has granted me the opportunity to hear the full range of his incredible Phil Ochs-style protest songs. Knowing him has also exposed me to several other anarcho and activist musicians to whom I had never previously listened.  And I gotta say, we need more like them in Vermont. And I don’t just mean any guy with a guitar who occasionally throws in a hateful word towards Bush while playing RíRá. I mean a full-out, crunchy political organizer, scribbling lyrics on napkins at Langdon Street Cafe while on breaks from volunteering at Black Sheep Books.

Are you out there?

Email me. Let’s start a musical movement.

Dan Bolles is a culture coeditor at Seven Days. He joined the paper in 2007 as its music editor, covering Vermont's robust music, comedy and nightlife scenes for a decade before deciding he was too old to be going to the Monkey House on weeknights to see rock shows for a living. He became assistant arts editor in 2017 and culture coeditor in 2021. Bolles has received numerous local and national awards for his writing on Vermont arts, sports and the occasional celebrity canine murder mystery. He loves...

16 replies on “Where Have All The Hippies Gone? by Bridget Burns”

  1. Unlike the author of this peice, the “Hippies” have learned from the previous generations mistakes. Figureheads and leaders get killed. Organized movements get infiltrated and subverted.Public protest is an increasingly meaningless act of performance art.Voting has been a bad joke for over a century.The next movement is decentralized, autonomous, apolitical, self-educated, and most of all, it’s already been underway for 20 years. You can complain publicly and wonder where everyone is, or you can get to work personally — and very shortly you’ll see how many of us are already out there. Start doing The Work and they really will find you.

  2. Man, it would be funny, though. Can you imagine? A shitload of celebs… let’s say, Eminem, Bono, Sheryl Crow, Dave Matthews, uh… Foo Fighters… I don’t know… they all get together and cut “America loves life” or “Let’s Love The World” or something, and it actually works. War, bad foreign policy, neo-cons… it all comes crashing down because of a three minute all-star sing along. I submit that it actually might be worse. I mean, can you imagine if people actually did take them seriously? Their heads would be the size of Cheney’s prostate.(They better get Quincy Jones to write it!)

  3. But we still need a new evolutionary paradigm whcih will render the old homosapien model of territorial aggression obsolete. ‘Til then, it’s all for naught.Very good point, and it’s kind of sad that we are at a point in human history that we can create a pill that will keep a 70-year old’s dick hard and find a way to inject toxins into rich womens’ faces to give them perma-smile but we still haven’t developed alternative fuel sources or ways to live without depleting other natural resources at a ridiculous rate. It will be interesting to see what makes us do the latter–mass enlightenment or mass extinction.As for music and social change, I think there is a good reason why most of the 60’s social singers either quit their careers and focused on direct politics, watched their careers fade away (Baez), got disillusioned by their lack of impact/fame (Ochs) or just realized early on that music doesn’t change immediate world events and when its timeless and not topical it is less dogma and more effective in changing its audiences’ life philosophies (Dylan).Plain and simple, anti-war songs are no better than an episode of the O’Reiley Factor–just because someone is speaking to your sensibilities in a passionate, black-and-white way doesn’t mean that its propaganda any less. Topical “protest” songs are just another example of American laziness–playing a song to change to world is like giving your house a paint job when the foundation is crumbling. It might make things look a bit brighter for a few minutes, but it really doesn’t get to the root of the problem (which, in this case, is closer to Casey’s idea than blaming Bush, Karl Rove or Petraeus).

  4. but, cant americans also protest the loss of iraqi life, or can we only cry for dead americans? if thats the case the numbers may even up- although i cant fucking imagine how many vietnamese civilians were killed.

  6. “exponentially higher casualties”. . . 58,000 u.s. dead in vietnam 2000 u.s. dead in iraq less than 1% of the u.s. population has any direct involvement with the war in iraq.

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