The Way We Actually Were (photo: brizzle born and bred/flickr)

Not too many days ago, someone asked a question that several of us answered: What is a DFH?

For those of us who were part of the everyday scene in the 60′s, that was easy. Many of us were, and all of us knew about, the Dirty F**king Hippies. How to explain what that actually meant is yet another thing.

The times were opening up new concepts of our social responsibility, when we were just at the time of getting our wings as young people. From the ticky tacky of the 50′s, with its conformity and Leave it to Beaver ideals, we were beginning to see, and our media was beginning to talk about, the very bad things beneath the surface.

Our Military Industrial Complex had become an operative drain on the sources of social responsibility our government was supposed to provide. While a national highway system and excellent educational system were a source of pride, the budget in our capitol was being skewed to the ends of deception, and in warring on other countries Vietnam had been inserted into our sites as The Enemy while the Cold War was winding down.

From McCarthyism, we had developed cynicism toward political demagoguery. Yet, a high point of heroism in freeing the world from Nazi crimes had left a patina of high ideals that our military took and ran away with, putting its budget off limits and not even reporting to the Congress that poured our treasury into its pockets.

When the young people in the U.S. turned to demonstrating against the evils of an older society, in the civil rights and anti-war movements, it was a break that left established powers fearful and resistant to their upcoming generation. The long hair and loose clothing that became our costume disturbed and offended adults who spent their lives trying to fit in with what they’d considered ideal.

We were the DFH’s, and free love was sometimes confused with high ideals, for us and especially for those who tried to keep us down. Some of us went the Haight Asbury route, smoked pot and slept around. Some of us did a little of that, and mostly demonstrated against the evils while joining with the better routes society took.   Many of us got into politics, married or moved in with people like us, raised families with social consciences, and actually did well economically.

What are we now? Look around you. There are a lot of us here, and in the blogs, still working to make the world a better place, and still critical of the evils that what are now known as the 1%, or the PTB, or the MOTU, work on what could and should be a good world.

If you’re young, we hope you keep trying. If you’re aging, we are trying to make the way as manageable forward into comfortable living as possible.

Hello, fellow DFHs – what did I leave out?