When we heard about the hippies, the barely more than boys and girls who decided to try something different . . . we laughed at them. Smug in our certain awareness that . . . communal life must be more difficult even than nuclear family life, which we know, to our very nerve endings, is disastrous. We condemned them, our children, for seeking a different future. We hated them for their flowers, for their love, and for their unmistakeable rejection of every hideous, mistaken compromise that we had made throughout our hollow, money-bitten, frightened, adult lives.
- - June Jordan - Old Stories : New Lives