The Universe is Shaken: Santa Cruz Was NOT Picked as one of the Country's Top 17 Hippie Cities????!!!

Either the author of this list got too stoned to find his way over Highway 17, or our city has changed more than we know.

Santa Cruz didn't make Estately's list of the Top 17 cities for hippies as compiled from Facebook surveys and some kind of stoned thumbsucking they call research.

How could a city with Land of Medicine Buddha, where they Dalai Lama has hung out not be on the list but Arcata, CA is? 

How could Austin make it, when we were keeping Santa Cruz weird while that was a cowtown and a place that George W. and Karl Rove called home?

Did the author not know that we have a political gadfly who went to federal court to protect his right to give a Nazi salute as freedom of speech and walks around in a bathrobe with a stuffed animal around his neck?  Have they not seen footage from our city council meetings? This womyn alone should have us in the Top 5.

OK, I concede that shutting down the drum circles was a big strike against us. There is incessant drumming in Berkeley and our lack of out-of-rhythm dread-locked white guys is really a step on the wrong direction, hippie-wise. But we still have the Farmer's Market and a lot of people there smell bad.

What a joke that Bloomington, Indiana or Berea, Kentucky could be listed above Santa Cruz. We were having the first acid tests at the Soquel Grange and wearing tie-dye while they were still sporting crew cuts and college football sweatshirts.

This is the problem with these lists. They get you riled up and have no factual basis for their findings. It's like putting out a list of great rock and rollers and forgetting the Beatles. 

Or have we gotten more conservative with our high rent downtown and our calls for more police and no more needle exchanges? Are we now too conservative to qualify as a hippie town any more?