In today’s crazy global political climate we’re seeing a lot of focus on who and/or what might be threatening our way of life. The politicians in the media tell us to fear refugees and welfare recipients; the conspiracy theorists are flooding our feeds with warnings about chemtrails and falling off a flat earth and the hippies are terrified of climate change, politicians and the media. All of these things (including banks and alien invasions of course) may pose some kind of threat to us in their own way, but I fear we are being blindsided with some kind of divisive scapegoating technique designed to distract us from the REAL threat to our way of life. Children, my friends, children.

Now before you get all defensive about your lovely bundles of spirited joy, I can assure you that I am not some kind of child hater. Nor is this another column written by an undervalued mother, smashing out the injustices of her thankless labours on her keyboard and getting nothing in return but a cute hashtag …but solidarity to you, Sisters #valium. I genuinely think children are lovely. It’s just that I have been paying close attention lately and I am pretty sure they are also terrorists.

I know this is going to take some convincing so I will just put my observations here:

• Anecdotal accounts from anyone who have children attest to the fact that they arrive in our country and completely change our way of life.
• They use well-known torture techniques like sleep deprivation and panoptic style surveillance methods to disorientate you and break your will. They will even go so far as to watch you on the toilet.
• Children have grown up to successfully invade, conquer and take control of every corner of every single country in the world.
• Those who have children begin to identify with their captors. A process that is encouraged by other captives of children in what can only be described as some kind of globalised Stockholm Syndrome.
• The government has obviously known about the dangers of children for years. Why else would they go to such great lengths to oppress and dispossess everyone who is young of all their rights and opportunities? They clearly need to protect us from this terrible threat to all we hold dear.
• 

So there it is. Hard to argue with evidence this compelling. Oh, I know we like to think we’re in control. We kid ourselves that we’re teaching them things, that we’re instilling in them values that align with our own and that in time they’ll realise our wisdom – just as we did with our parents …right? Well, I don’t know about you but I certainly never realised my parents’ wisdom. I nod politely when they tell me how to live and think it’s downright hilarious watching them get all freaked out over microwave oven technology. Children don’t come around to our wisdom. They obliterate it and replace it with their own.

That’s right my friends and allies in the aging population, Millennials have become more relevant than you and me. Oh, they will let us believe that we still have some influence in the world for now. They’ll let us think it’s us mocking them while they secretly laugh at our out-of-date thinking, our weird social etiquette and bizarre turmeric free coffees. And, as if that isn’t bad enough, those gorgeously small, big eyed, nappy wearing overlords, screaming blue murder because you threw away that piece of Lego that the dog chewed on for three weeks? Those little spies will, in our lifetime, take over parliament and put themselves in charge of our aged care pension policies. Yep. After they complete the slow, insidious but completely inevitable erosion of our values and our relevance they will take over the world and there is not a goddamn thing you can do to stop it.

So be nice to your children and think twice before mocking a Millennial because, before you know what’s happening, they won’t just walk around like they own the place, they WILL own it.

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Today I did what I thought was a fairly insignificant thing and bought myself a plastic cutlery set from Woolworths. As I swiped my purchase at the self-serve checkout a very official notification advised me to stay put while I waited for assistance.

You see, it turns out that the set contained a type of knife – a butter knife – and buying a knife makes me a potentially violent criminal. If I were a violent criminal intending to use my butter knife for ill purposes, that would be Woolworth’s fault for allowing me to acquire a dangerous weapon masquerading as picnic ware and they could be sued for my crimes.

Thankfully, the teenager in charge of assessing my psychological state against the likelihood that I would commit plastic-butter-knife-homicide decided I was a safe bet and let me leave with my new cutlery. I now feel safer in the knowledge that fully trained Woolworths staff are here to protect us at self-serve checkouts across the country – we live in dangerous times you know.

Things really are getting bad out there. Just the other week a primary school in Geelong had to ban the children from hugging one another in a bid to protect them.

The headmaster said that nothing in particular had prompted the decision but: “In this current day and age we are really conscious about protecting kids and teaching them from a young age that you have to be cautious.”

Kids taking part in ‘hugging’ now deemed to be a highly dangerous activity.

Apparently this day and age is so crazy dangerous that excess hugging has now become a gateway activity to criminal behaviour…or something. I always thought hugging was fairly safe but I must have been mixing up my days and ages because I don’t think a trained principal would just make up arbitrary rules based on nonsense. I don’t doubt that he has based his decision on solid research that indicates a causal link between excess hugging as a child and becoming some kind of terrifying cuddling menace in later years. I’m sure lots of Australians are hugged to death every year and this principal is just doing his bit to stop the madness.

And it’s not just the children who need protecting from the terrible dangers of the world either. Some friends of mine recently returned from a holiday in New Zealand and were telling me all about the treacherous activities they had taken part in. Evidently they have bushwalks over there that go near cliffs and the edges aren’t even signed.

As you can imagine I was horrified. What are they thinking? Don’t they know people will just walk off cliffs unless they’re instructed not to in writing? I always knew those Kiwis were backwards.

Thankfully in Australia we look after our citizens and protect them from injury. Last night I was at the cinema and noticed a sign that read ‘For the safety of yourself and others you are under constant video surveillance’. Well, thank goodness for that!

I was so relieved but also, as I started to think back, my whole life sort of flashed before my eyes. I’ve been to countless movies and, until recently, no one filmed me doing it! I remember sitting in the Star-Court cinema as a child, eating ice cream in the dark, completely oblivious to the fact that my safety was being compromised by inadequate video surveillance.

It’s this current diligence to public safety that provides us with helpful information on potentially hazardous products too. Like this tube of cold sore cream I just found in my bathroom cupboard for instance: ‘Do not use in eyes,’ it helpfully advises in bold text (no I’m not making this up).

I can only assume this is to:

a) be informative about where not to put cold sore cream, and

b) protect the company who makes it from financial liability in case anyone puts the cold sore cream in their eyes on purpose because no-one told them it wasn’t a good idea.

Is there a precedent for this? Who are these people smearing medicated ointments in their eyes thereby making it necessary to warn other potential eye smearers of the dangers of this activity? I’m developing some concerns for our collective IQ

Are we really being protected or just sanitised into a nation of dullards? I genuinely think we need to turn this trend around and start actively encouraging more risks – because risks come right before all the good stuff in life. Our kids need us to show them how to tell the difference between discomfort, calculated risk and “Oh my god don’t even think about it kid!” risks.

I know that a little bit of protection will always be necessary. I think we can all get behind Woolworth’s policy of not selling butter knives to dangerous people at their self-serve checkouts without a thorough psychological analysis from the staff.

And if New Zealanders could just, I don’t know, kindly refrain from throwing any Aussies over their cliffs for whining about their bushwalks, that would be really great. But ultimately I reckon a bit more getting our hands dirty, some surveillance free movies and a whole heap more hugging might be kinda good for us.

Y’all take care out there.

India Morris is a Lismore-based writer who likes to hurtle down white water rapids whenever she gets the chance.

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In the name of good will and clarity amongst friends I feel the need to start this rave with a disclaimer:

Disclaimer

As a native hippie (someone who was born into a hippie family and therefore had no choice in living out their childhood subjected to all of the associated floral painted, sarong wearing, lentil flavoured, tambourine shaking social stigma) it is my birth right to:

A) Pick and choose which aspects of hippie life I will or will not tolerate

B) Be entirely inconsistent with said picking and choosing 

C) Mercilessly take the absolute piss out of anything and everything that hippies stand for before participating fully in any or all of the things I have just taken the piss out of without remorse or apology. All second-generation hippies share this right and it is our hope that the wider community will come to appreciate our unique position without taking offence or ever thinking they can join in the hippie sledging themselves because that would be bad. Very very bad.

(Disclaimer for the disclaimer:
It’s slightly possible that I don’t speak for 100% of second-generation hippies.)

I am half hippie on my parent’s side but I don’t formally identify as hippie. You see, an anomaly occurs when two hippies breed and instead of achieving the expected outcome of hippie + hippie = hippie, you in fact get a kind of hybrid throwback subcultural mutation. We are kind of yuppies but we’re sort of hippies. We are an under-represented sub-group known colloquially as the ‘yippie’. We are comfort hogs. We are more middle class than the middle class and our parents, quite frankly, are aghast. For all their great intentions, the first wave of hippies bred an entire generation with a fetish for electricity, running water and boundaries – yes, you heard me right – boundaries. We don’t have romantic visions of living in tipis, yurts or shacks held together with mud and a promise of future labour, largely because we already know about the mould.

Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t regret the years I spent living in a tent or bathing in a glorified bucket with water that was only hot during summer daylight hours and washing myself with whatever soap the bush turkeys hadn’t eaten. I liked sharing my kitchen with land mullets and, as I near my 40s, I am nearly used to snakes.

I am sincerely grateful for my parent’s generation who pioneered the hippie dream. They saved important forests and fought for rights that I now take for granted. They gave us a social conscience and taught us about diversity and walking our talk. But most importantly they invented solar power systems that actually work, composting toilets that don’t smell and they have forced environmentally sustainable products into the mainstream so that us yippies can stand by our principles without compromising our deep seated need for comfortable housing. As soon as my generation began to enter maturity the communes began rapidly evolving from an eclectic array of huts, tree houses and humpies, barely distinguishable from the bush outside (often because the bush outside was also growing inside), to a stunning collection of well insulated mansions and studios surrounded by low maintenance gardens and lawns bordered by sub-tropical rainforest.

The deviation from our trail blazing parents by no means ends with comfortable houses either. Most of our parents are grandparents now and they can’t believe how stitched up we’ve become! They spent all of those years modelling a new parenting style of trust and freedom, allowing us to fully experience our childhood without the controlling, rule obsessed upbringings that they endured. They nurtured our free spirits only to have their very own rainbow children start using this bloody “boundaries” word to such excess that they just can’t understand where they went wrong. Hippie grandparents try to sneak in feral, free-range mischief the way our grandparents used to try to sneak chocolate and Barbie dolls into our sugar free, body positive humpies. But we don’t have free-range children. We don’t have free-range children because we were free-range children and we know exactly what free-range children get up to! I love catching up with my old yippie friends just so we can drink tea in our comfortable, open plan kitchens and wonder to each other how we ever survived our childhoods. And if only those well meaning, baby booming, drop out parents of ours really knew what we did with our free-range adolescence!

India Morrris’s childhood home – a ‘Hippie hut’ deep in the rainforest…

Yippies are not immediately recognisable like our hippie counterparts. We don’t wear flares or headbands and we have traded in all of the “groovy’s” and “far out’s” for a more conservative vernacular. Our most distinguishable feature is our special brand of cynicism. We wear our antagonistic worldview on our sleeves like a beacon of hope to other survivors of the badly cooked tofu era. We have now integrated into wider society so our little flags of fond derision can be found hiding where you least expect them. Like the popular café in town for instance where our favourite second gen barista wears a T-shirt with Soy won’t save you! printed proudly across the front as he smiles and makes your soy latte. We love to hang out on our designer lounges and entertain each other by adopting a satirical hippie patois and laughing until our stomachs hurt. “Hey sister, did you hear about the sacred squawking seagull healing space for womb magic? They do this really powerful detox with a seaweed head wrap and organic slug exfoliation ritual that will totally fix your third eye myopia.”

It’s not that we necessarily reject the value of all that mumbo jumbo, breathing from your base chakra, inner child clap trap. We don’t in all seriousness begrudge anyone the right to whatever personal benefits they derive from their new age practices and potions, we probably even believe in some of them, it’s just that we’ve been over exposed. Young people from every sub culture need to rebel and for us that meant rallying against all of those earnest lectures about inner beauty and intensely awkward workshops where our elders tried to connect with us using sacred chanting and heart sounds. This natural need to rebel has nurtured in us a powerful satirical response that I for one am genuinely grateful for! Our hippie parents have given us a lifetime of comedic material and in doing so have made the world a funnier place for their children and their children’s children.

Now let me just reiterate my disclaimer disclaimer, although I like to think that most of my yippie brothers and sisters are nodding in agreement while they casually press the preferred setting on their latest energy efficient dishwasher, I know that I can’t speak for each and every member of my generation. I know that each of us has a personal variant on the yippie theme and some of us still encourage drumming circles, while others still love lentils the way mum used to make them. I will however address one important yippie issue that I can confidently say stands for all of us. I can assert with absolute certainty that none of us, not a godamn single little one of us, will ever truly get over the deep and hurtful betrayal of sugarless carob Easter eggs!!

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