From our People are People series.
Young women in Indian or Himalayan dresses, dancing wherever they want, hugging random strangers. Young men with long hair and some non-tobacco smokables getting lost in whatever train of thought they thought they were. And all of them Buddha quoting peaceniks talking to their flowers and prone to skinny dipping.
Then the redneck, gun toting, squirrel skinning, linguistically challenged, sun burnt mountain log cabin dwellers.
These are just of the stereotypical images almost all of us know and love, or love to hate. And while Americans know the lines are far from clear, folks over here in Europe are constantly surprised when they hear of redneck hippies or hippie rednecks.
Blame Cheech and Chong and the Woodstock movie, mainly.
Woodstock was not a free concert.
Again, Woodstock was not a free concert.
It became one after the concert had sold out of tickets and thousands more folks showed up. That's when the organizers showed their hippie colors and decided to roll with it. That's how the account told the story.
Hitching a ride in a pickup truck with a Confederate flag covering most of the vehicle may be interesting, but in the parking lot after a show of a prototypical hippie band?
Much of this permeability has to do with libertarian views, a concept not handled well by the German language, with the term "libertär" not a good equivalent.
It is just as well that both "redneck" and "hippie" denote these groups in German, with the requisite capitalization of the nouns, of course.
Holding some redneck views works because of that hippie tolerance, because even those who are in touch with their inner redneck are....people.
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