These sweaty hippies might be the last torchbearers of America’s counterculture
The Rainbow Family‘s authentic utopia
To be a hippie in the 21st century takes grit. Cost of living notwithstanding, the collision of late capitalism, technology, and a new generation of disinterested squares has made this a tough time for the homeless, granola-munching, gonorrhea-transmitting sages of the counterculture we all assumed would die long before weed ever became legal. We’re not talking about the bourgeois wannabes or part-time burners who “innovate” and “disrupt” at your startup. Real hippies, like early homesteaders, put in work. They care about community and inclusiveness, and their ideals are there to stand for something. Like building a better tomorrow in harmony with nature and man, usually while stoned and doused in patchouli.
Take, for example, those who identify as members of the Rainbow Family of Living Light. The group traces its roots to Oregon, in 1970, where the intermingling of minds emerging from the post-Haight-Ashbury haze realized that events like Woodstock could inform their dream of an intentional community built on love and pacifism. Those founding principles have been the impetus behind a growing international movement of countercultural “Rainbow Gatherings” ever since. With an anarcho-utopian worldview, the Rainbow Family is leaderless and unstructured—more of a guiding philosophy than an organized movement — following the principle of “radical inclusion,” wherein money is not tendered and basic needs are provided by and for all members. Gatherings don’t have entrance fees—or permits — which makes them scrappy affairs running more on hippie ingenuity and enthusiasm than actual resources. “Rainbows” are expected to pitch in with everything from cooking to cleaning to child care. Run-ins with authorities have caused some controversy, as in 2000, when Montana governor Marc Racicot declared a state of emergency amidst concerns about potential environmental damage.
In line with their utopian socialist predecessors of the 19th century, the Rainbow Family emphasizes removal from society as a first step toward self-sustainability. Their anti-capitalist, non-hierarchical, consensus-driven stance is grounded in a belief that love and respect and hard work are the foundation of community — not transactional capitalism or profit motives. Naive? Maybe. But if revitalization movements, as defined by the late anthropologist Anthony F. C. Wallace, are a “deliberate, organized, conscious effort by members of a society to construct a more satisfying culture,” members of the Rainbow Family are chasing their bliss to existential fulfillment pragmatically—if unhurriedly—one Om chant at a time.
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