Pacific Northwest | John Steven Olmstead

Sitting in a tiny waiting room while my car was being serviced, a middle aged, overdressed woman with two children, girls aged about 7 and 8, sat across from me. The girls complained over and again about the wait. “Mom, we’re going to be here all day.” At first it was cute, then odd, then very annoying. This went on for several minutes as mom continued to assure them that the work on their car would NOT take “all day.” Finally, mom had enough (long after I had). “Well what would you rather do,” she asked with frustration in her voice, “take a walk in Everett? Sarcastically she then posed the rhetorical question, “wouldn’t THAT be fun?” The older of the two girls answered quickly, “no! I don’t want to walk with hippies! The town we were in is Everett, Washington, a moderately-sized city one county away from Seattle. Everett has it’s hippies, I’m sure, but it’s made up mostly of aerospace employees, retail workers, and a few drug addicts. Not exactly San Francisco. Since when are children afraid of hippies, anyway? What happened to good ol’ monsters under the bed? The year is 2014, not 1964, and unless you’re a fundamental-extremist, George Bush, or the taliban, anybody calling themselves a “hippie” is probably not a threat to your way of life. I feel that it must have taken a great deal of time and repetition to pound into this kid that: A. Everett is a hippie town, and B. that hippies are somehow dangerous. It irritates me that the parent did not instead spend that energy teaching the child to be non-judgemental. What exactly does she think hippies might do to warp her children, I wonder? Teach them about nonviolent direct action? Teach them to hate war? You can’t have that kind of peace running rampant, I suppose. The burning question I have above all, however, is this: why get your car fixed in “hippie-land?” I mean, for the love of some Pagan god, they might slip a peace-sign sticker on it while it’s in the shop. Can’t you get your car fixed in whatever well-groomed, overpriced rock you live under, you conceited, closed minded ass? Please, lady, find a place to live- perhaps Kansas- that has no hippies. In retrospect, I should have said something like, “excuse me, I take offense to that. I’m the Chairman of the Everett Hippie Counsel, over at 420 Commie Avenue, near Peace Street. After this, I’m getting lunch at the Soviet Tavern, where they serve the good vodka. Right now, I happen to know (because I have the inside scoop), that they are outfitting your American-made minivan with an electric motor and ripping the fish decal off the back. You had better leave town before they start painting it Tie-Dye.”