Dorothy Day on Hippies

...[F]or her, the 1960s had been full of signs of something vital that had gone out of the world--a glue that had held things together no longer worked.  And there was the war in Vietnam, a grotesque torture that depressed the spirits of all and seemed to her to accentuate the discordant and even the grotesque in a world apparently become meaningless.  On May 11, 1969, she wrote to Della [her sister] from St. Cloud, Minnesota, where she was visiting several Catholic Worker families.  She found that that singular effluence of the 1960s, the "hippies," were more numerous there than in New York.  "They are marrying young--17 and 18, and taking to the woods up by the Canadian border and building houses for themselves--becoming pioneers again.  It's as tho they were determined to live--to get out of the war atmosphere they have lived in all their lives--a new generation entirely."  A new generation of pioneers, yes, but Dorothy found them "maddening."  Hippies, in her view, were the offscourings of middle-class affluence who affirmed nothing except the principle of reducing every principle to the absurd.  In view of all the horror of Vietnam, Dorothy could imagine that "the soldiers would like to come back and kill these flower-power, loving people" who had "not known suffering."  What more properly would be in order for them was "prayer and penance" and "fasting."--William D. Miller, Dorothy Day: A Biography, pg. 491.