I have some serious gripes with hippies these days.

First off: MOVE FASTER!!!! Why the heck do you all walk so slow? Have you ever tried driving through a hippie town filled with stop sign intersections (Santa Cruz is a perfect example—Burlington another). Prepare to wait three times longer than a red light in L.A. before the hippies finally even cross your path. It will take you an hour to go two miles.

But not all hippies are slow and evil. Just the ones who are black holes of ignorance, purveyors of hypocrisy and paragons of laziness; I’ve dubbed them Hippiecrites.

Examples of Hippiecrites can be found all around us. The sooner you are able to recognize them, the sooner you will be able to call them out on their regurgitated rhetoric.

Santa Cruz, ’06: When I was on TOUR, the local bus drivers were on strike. Everywhere I went there was a frickin’ hippie stickin’ his thumb out, tryin’ to cop a ride, which isn’t so bad or odd, (non-mooching hippies are like Albinos – rare). I am usually more than happy to oblige my fellow man.

But what kills me is the ensuing rant about big gasoline, the political incorrectness of my vehicle and the evil corporations the minute they get in your car—all this while they sit in your back seat, give you a moral lesson, act like their broke-ass knows a thing about business and look down at you from the compost pile they stand upon barefoot….

“It ok if I smoke in here man?” they ask as they light up a doob.

…Oh, and to top it all off, they don’t even offer you a hit.

Fucking Hippiecrites.

At music festivals they sit around, sing songs of peace and preach the virtues of non-carnivorous living… all this while they bang on their leather-drums, drop acid and live in disgusting, unsanitary conditions for days on end. I’ll take the medium-rare steak over the fried brain any day, thank you.

Damn Hippiecrites.

I can forgive the lack of self-awareness. But I can’t forgive deliberate displays of ingratitude and idiocracy. I encountered this, quite possibly the most oxymoronic statement you will ever see, in Santa Cruz (Hippie Ground Zero). This is the handiwork of a Typical Hippiecrite:


Exhibit A

Oh yeah? You hate freedom? Guess what dumbass: YOU CAN ONLY SAY THAT IN A FREE FUCKING COUNTRY!!! Just be thanking your lucky stars you aren’t getting an arm chopped off, watching your wife and daughter get raped before they shoot you execution style, or many of the other horrible, atrocities that can - and amazingly still do* - occur regularly to our fellow humans in places that don’t value freedom. Exhibit A as to why people in other countries hate Americans.

Ridiculous statements such as "I hate freedom" should be strictly forbidden. I say, throw ‘em in jail. Then they’ll see how much they hate their freedom. I bet whoever made that sticker is some over-educated, disillusioned, liberal arts, trust-fund baby searching for meaning in their life; meaning they think they will find by joining up with a bunch of other over-indulged, spoiled, lost souls, sitting around campfires, smoking salvia, weaving tall tales of conspiracy and looking down their nose at people who use paper towels and don’t shop at the local sustainable farm co-op.

**News Flash Hippiecrites - Freedom hates you!!!** Why? Because you use your freedom irresponsibly to make uninformed statements that come solely from a mentality and position of privilege, instead of using your advantages and education to really make the changes you KNOW are necessary for our survival as a species.

But therein lies not only the problem, but also the place from which statements like "I hate freedom come": First World Guilt. Here in the First World most of us are enjoying a lifestyle of comfort and convenience never before seen by humanity, yet people still starve every day, EVERYWHERE. We know this. Yet we do nothing.

At the very root of First World Guilt, the source of much of the self-hatred, apathy, disillusionment, depression and anxiety our entire generation feels, is a sense of hating the responsibility that comes with freedom. Whether it is in Japan, Europe or America—this phenomenon persists.

We have all the freedom in the world, but we are still not free of the images of hunger and violence that permeate our planet and, until all humans share the same basic rights, none of us will ever be truly free of self-loathing.

It’s easy to sit around a Utopia like Santa Cruz and ponder all that is wrong with society from the safety of a pot luck dinner; eating vegan sausage topped with fresh herbs from the garden co-op, drinking homemade Sangria—But talk is cheap. And you can’t put a price on freedom.

*Along with hunger, there are certain things that are unacceptable on a planet as small and connected as ours and we as humans should all unite in this mentality. But this is something that will be addressed in the Maniphesto.
Evolve or Die