Why didn't the hippies get into the jfk assassination ?

[Jim Hackett II]

First I gotta say how can I not admire and respect David Crosby?
Truth to Power....

Drugs had very little to do with my own paradigm shift, more coincidental and just a little later than the huge awakening of Spring '67.
I hadn't rejected the redneck ways yet until summer '68.
Redneck in that time is not the redneck of today.
For years I had held silent sympathy and a feeling of kinship with the "damned civil rights workers invading the south", as they were named in the culture of the rednecks.

To me they were citizens actively seeking redress of a wrong. So I suppose even in grade school when JFK was murdered I was already taking the road less traveled for a while before '67

I can't leave out the war. In '67 I was loosing faith in Vietnamese victory, after 2 years and no end in sight - something was amiss here.
At this point in '67 I was fortunate enough to be in a high school "current affairs" class from a teacher not so anxious to toe the line and LIE to the students.

I am sure I was fertile soil for the teaching I was getting. Political discussion (dictations to the youngsters around) was part of the life in this Scot's-Irish household.
I was being shown the internal moral compass I was given was more correct than Archie Bunker/George Wallace/Curt Le May BS of the Waylon Jennings fans were trying to force into my gullet.

I have had Generation Xers claim "we had it easy with free sex and drugs", from fools that didn't live the oppression and like from Nixon that followed the 1960s.
Simplistic in the extreme and petty jealousy for something that never was in reality.

The only damn drug I had ever consumed at the age of 15 was alcohol. And I did not like it at all.
Oh the Parents of the kids undergoing the catharsis of the time, I can see now why parents were freaking out.
A generation, global generation was openly rejecting the capitalism the preceding generation had based their values upon.
The generation had had ENOUGH of drafting to war for Empire.
In my own time drugs had little to do with the choice I made to not be another damn fool redneck.

In my Junior year of high school a "drug list" of student was released. Today I would sue.
Anyway I was mightily offended. I hadn't even ever seen a joint, but by God if you punks are gonna accuse me I'm gonna find out what I am accused of enjoying.
I was pissed by the BS fascism of this falsified list.

You wanna know who made the list? No matter the intoxicants taken IF ANY, the unconventional thinkers, the long hairs, and the students that had the guts to confront BS shoveled into minds in classrooms.
Anyone that openly confronted racism in Martinsville Indiana in 1968 was definitely included in this list.
I did so and had to fight the 'necks, not a problem as I am not a total pacifist and was not then.

By 1968 my imposed short hair was gone and I was no longer asked by my parents if I wanted to go to family reunions.
What the parents did not know was the youths were having our own private reunions, where we didn't get harassed or told we looked like women with our hair.
By 1968 the murders of MLK and RFK destroyed any hope in "inside the system" change.
I was radicalized against the Establishment that summer - forever.

I was hitchhiking home from school one day on the primary highway from Indy to Bloomington. When another long hair picked me up. Oct. 68.
Why can I recall, two reasons. First I was introduced to pot on the ride and, second I chose to go the 15 miles past home to this man's apartment and the Indiana University culture I found there.
Gee Toto we ain't in Kansas no more.

SDS was active in the IU commons as well as other radical left groups of people. I had found a community that not only agreed with my views but even more so could support the views with history.
That community not the drug culture was responsible for stealing me away from the redneck mindbent sickness permanently.
Suddenly I wasn't hanging out at the local malt shop worried about getting a date with Sue Sweetcakes or who won the last big game.
Needless to say I have never gone to my "high school reunion" and never will, I see my friends from the time without the ceremonial gong shows endorsing the still racist town values.

I was hitching to Bloomington more and more often and detached the old MHS bullcrap. More and more involved in stopping the war before my number came up as white trash I knew it would.
I had been warned by a neighbor secretary of the Draft Board to avoid the draft if possible, an elderly lady knew more than I at that point.

I can and will state right here and now that there were a helluva lot more drugs (and much more dangerous drugs) in the USMC barracks than in the culture that shifted my own paradigm so radically.
The music and the culture were much more influential than the drugs to me in my catharsis.

In my opinion the culture went away to disco and I lost touch with the common culture of dancing and cocaine. Something happened between 1972 and 1975 that I was not aware of and still wonder about.
What happened to the activism? Was it really cocaine. Did the people not hear Sam Ervin's proceedings? Or Frank Church's reports?
The Mighty Wurlitzer won out. Dammit.
Or what?
Kids and "responsibilities"?

I cannot accept that as I know too many people my age that did raise their children as free thinking and aware citizens.

I still don't understand where did the impetus of 1971-2 go?

FWIW
Jim