The new Woodstock generation

In late May, New York magazine noted a highly unusual advertisement that appeared on Craigslist. A young Brooklyn couple had decided to sell virtually everything they owned, from electronics to furniture to designer shoes, for $8,500. As it turns out, the couple was planning on taking their two young children and setting out for the open road. Two weeks earlier, the New York Times profiled several other couples who had made a similar choice — to surrender their accumulated possessions and, with toddlers in tow, to leave a dreary, consumption-driven urban existence behind for something nobler and more environmentally sound. One couple, the Harrises, have been chronicling their adventures on a website called ‘Cage Free Family’, a clever reference to the cage-free hens so dearly loved by the ecologically correct. Though Jeff Harris had achieved financial success as a computer network engineer, he and his wife felt very keenly that they needed to reconnect with the land. And so the Harrises intend to leave bustling Austin, Texas for the greener pastures, literally and figuratively, of Vermont.

Now, it could be that these back-to-the-land bohemians are mere curiosities, puffed up by New York and the Times simultaneously to delight and guilt-trip their status-obsessed readership. No one knows how many Americans are embracing ‘voluntary simplicity’, whether by becoming ‘freegans’ — that is, people who dive into rubbish bins for food out of choice, not necessity — or by abandoning suburban ranch houses to live in communes or campers. But my hunch is that these cage-free families represent the coming of a new hippie moment.

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Douglas Murray

Why were the Abedis here in the first place?

The hippies are now remembered mostly as foul-smelling, tie-dye-clad libertines who, when not covered in a thick haze of marijuana smoke or indulging in ‘free love’, could be found protesting against the Vietnam war or some other supposed outrage perpetrated by ‘AmeriKKKa’.