You would know better than I having lived through it but I thought it was more a overall cultural thing of the time (although I could obviously be wrong about that). I was just making fun of the hippies because that what’s Cartman would do.
(I look at my father’s pictures from the ‘70’s when he was a semi-hippie/professor and he definitely had the long hair as did many of his friends/colleagues)
I don’t know about cultural so much as a generational change. Long hair was a thumb on the nose towards the establishment which was a shock to the previous generation which had a far higher and simpler respect for authority.
This was generational sea change that began in WW1, continued through the Second World War and Korea and culminated in unpopular Vietnam war. For three generations the young men of Western Society had been gathered up, marched into machine gun and artillery fire with profligate inhumanity by the older generations who sat safely behind them, called them cowards if they didn’t adhere to their anachronistic view of honor and duty and denied them political rights to have a say in how those wars and sacrificing their lives, should be prosecuted.
The long hair of the young men of the sixties and seventies became a visible symbol that told the older generation that we live in a Republic and we have rights and you can’t sacrifice our lives without giving us a say. That resulted in the political movement that changed the legal adult age from 21 to the legal age to be drafted of 18.
So long hair was a symbol of youth movement that ended the draft and of nation States decimating their population of young men and securing greater rights for women and minorities.
One can tell who the least valued members of a society are by how the are treated and prior to the 60’s it was pretty damned obvious that young men, old women and blacks were the least valued members of society. The youth generation of the 60’s and 70’s, in other words the Boomer generation changed all of that and long hair to our generation is a strong symbol of that huge sea change that happened.
So it really burns my ass to watch millennials, who are unquestionably the weakest pussies of any American generation ever produced, who stand by and let those rights of young adults get whittled away cause they can’t be bothered to stop playing video games or having their little feelings hurt, than to take the time to fight for their rights.
That’s why millennials are the best qualified generation of Americans to handle our current crisis. Who else is better prepared to stay at home and do nothing than millennials?
