Youth: The Hippies

YOUTH One sociologist calls them “the Freudian proletariat.” Another observer sees them as “expatriates living on our shores but beyond our society.” Historian Arnold Toynbee describes them as “a red warning light for the American way of life.” For California's Bishop James Pike, they evoke the early Christians: “There is something about the temper and quality of these people, a gentleness, a quietness, an interest—something good.” To their deeply worried parents throughout the country, they seem more like dangerously deluded dropouts, candidates for a very sound spanking and a cram course in civics—if only they would return home to receive either. Whatever their meaning and wherever they may be headed, the hippies have emerged on the U.S

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