This is a term paper on hippies.

Essay by littlerbit420High School, 12th gradeA, November 2003

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Lessons from a Hippie Society

The hippie movement, positive or negative, brought an abundance of changes to mainstream society, affecting every generation since. The influences of the time brought an open-minded change in lifestyle and love and a mind-bending trip through rock-n-roll and drugs. We saw political, spiritual, literary, and musical leaders rise and fall, leaving a lifetime of lessons behind them. According to Webster Dictionary in 1965, the definition for the word hippie was "a usually young person who rejects the mores of established society and advocates a nonviolent ethic; broadly: a long haired unconventionally dressed young person".

The Vietnam War was something that affected everyone in America, if you didn't get drafted then you knew someone who did. We were drafting men as young as nineteen, the youngest age in history. By February 1967, there were four hundred and twenty seven thousand soldiers in Vietnam. Over 1,750 U.

S. planes had been lost and six thousand six hundred American soldiers had been killed ( ). By the time it ended, over two million Americans were involved in the war, and more than sixty thousand didn't return alive.

The anti-war protest was beginning to spread across America. The first large peace march was called "Vietnam Day" and was organized by Jerry Rubin ( ). On April 15th, 1967, three hundred people gathered in New York's Central Park to protest. Thousand of picket signs raised in the air with statements such as "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today" ( ), in protest against sending men as young as nineteen. Young men burned their draft cards in a large bonfire in a defiant protest to the war. After burning his, Dan Baty hid in a Methodist church, protected by a Reverend who refused to turn him over...