Kirsten Brydum’s journal

A reader writes:

Kirsten Brydum’s father, who comes originally from Denmark, and is a computer repair guy in Orange County, created this memorial website for her. Most interesting are the “journal” entries that she created in the days before her murder in New Orleans. They paint a picture of a counterculture neo-hippie type wandering the USA. There are only five journal entries, but they are vivid. She comments on Detroit, Minneapolis during the the RNC, and other cities she stopped in along her way, crashing on sofas and borrowing bicycles to travel all over.

It brought back a lot of memories of the 1970s and the Movement. I guess the back-to-the-earth type hippie chicks and dudes never died out completely.

- end of initial entry -

Stephen T. writes:

A reader writes: “It brought back a lot of memories of the 1970s and the Movement. I guess the back-to-the-earth type hippie chicks and dudes never died out completely.”

Yes, Kirsten Brydum was a classic hippie chick. Tragically, she was a hippie chick at least 30 years too late. The (boring, square, mostly white Anglo) America of the 1960s and 1970s, where back-to-earth types could hitchhike across the country, freaking out the local straights and living off the land, is no more. Ironically, the orderly society which made that free-wheeling life surviveable for most of Kirsten’s Sixties predecessors is precisely what they wished to dismantle. It has been replaced by the kind of brutal chaos identified with Third World regions like Mexico and Africa. Kirsten was born too late for those bad old days (as she probably would have called them), in which the uncivilized were suppressed and sequestered by the larger society. Today, they are mainstream.

Gintas writes:

The callow Brydum roaming the wilds of New Orleans reminds me of “Bambi vs. Godzilla”.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 28, 2008 12:22 PM | Send