Many events in history have influenced America and have changed it. Some have been for the good. Some have been for the bad. Some events have taken place when America was a small nation, and some have happened during its glory years. Everything that has happened in American history, no matter how small, has impacted America sometime down the road. Whether the event has affected the social, economical, and political side of America, nothing has affected the American way of life like the hippie movement that took place in the late 60's and early 70's.

The Hippie Movement started in 1960. The Vietnam War was the major event during that time and was dragging on and on. In the first part of the war, people did not mind the war. But as the death toll increases, people decided that America should get out of Vietnam. They did not want killing and a lot did not want to be apart of society. Allen Ginsberg, the father of the Hippie Movement, started by writing about what he saw wrong in the world. He was a poet so he expressed his thoughts to the world in poems. His poems would be read with music, which made them very popular. This started to catch on and coffee shops and jazz shops started to open up for hippies to recite poems. In 1961 if you went to the subway you could see beatniks, a group of people that would do a beat on a drum and say a poem about what they thought should be changed.

The Hippie Movement was an offspring of the beatniks. They were a group of people with alternative lifestyle and radical beliefs. It spread through United States to Canada, and into parts of Europe but the greatest influence was in America. The age of a hippie ranged from 15 to 25 years old. A lot of young teens ran away from their families to join this popular group of careless people. The Hippie movement appealed to teens because it represented Freedom and a way to have fun. Hippies believed in a utopian society in which all differences in class, race, social status, and gender should disappear so that each individual could satisfy his or her actual needs. They believed in the Zen version of Buddhism, in which the use of drugs, especially LSD, was perfectly expectable. They were tossing aside the old and traditional values that were so strong in America in earlier years, and were setting a lower standard for people to be accepted. An article from the July, 1967 issue of Time Magazine shows how ignorant adults were to what the Hippie Movement was going to turn into: "Whatever

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