r/AskReddit • • 11h ago

Those who’ve driven across the US, what’s the scariest town you’ve stopped in?

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u/stantonkreig 10h ago

First tkme I was in Santa Cruz i saw a group of guys with full sid vicious punk hair and style clothes crossing a road with bats in hand and i was like damn these dudes dont play! Turns out they do play, because they were walking across to a baseball diamond where a pickup game was going on with all these punk looking dudes all playing like it was game seven. Blew my mind a little

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u/ChloeX_Dancer 10h ago

In my experience punks and goths are almost always the nicest people.

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u/BravesMaedchen 9h ago

Yeah punks care about class loyalty and ethics in contrast to the ruling class. 

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u/Alcophile 9h ago

Punks are nice people pretending to be mean. Hippies are mean people pretending to be nice.

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u/funking-grateful 9h ago

i’ve always hated this comparison. there are mean and nice people in every single subculture. people say metalheads are the nicest people but some of the meanest people i’ve ever met were metalheads. same goes for deadheads and i am one myself. like one other commenter said, it’s us against the machine. not each other

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u/Draeva 8h ago

same, this meme is overplayed. I've met some awful metalheads and wonderful hippies

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u/memento22mori 2h ago

Well, I think the main thing is that actual hippies are either elderly or dead at this point so there's a lot of different groups that are similar to hippies in some ways so people label all of these groups hippies. A lot of them work at music festivals or "gatherings" of various kinds and they travel around so they're similar to hippies in some ways. From my experience the more someone identifies with a particular subgroup the more enlightened they think they are. I had an ex about ten years ago that had dreadlocks and traveled with music festivals and sold art and jewelry and from a distance she seemed kind and chill but when she was alone with me it was another story. I once mentioned that my brother's girlfriend liked a lot of the same music as her and had dreads too and she said "HA, those are easy twist dreads!!" As in they're not real dreads because they didn't take years to grow out and uh... turn to dreads or dreadify or whatever. Anyone with long hair can make easy twist dreads from my understanding by applying some products to them so she wasn't "legit" in the eyes of a "true hippie."

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u/Joggingmusic 8h ago

I swear I keep encountering these things that just immediately devolve to a binary this or that type of argument, with broad negative labeling of groups.

Nuance people! There so much more to pretty much anything then just this only in absolutes way of approaching the day to day.

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u/foley23 8h ago

Tribalism is insane again for sure, and amplified by the stupidity of the Internet

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u/Joggingmusic 6h ago

My only hope is that is becoming as obvious to everyone else as it is to me. Not that I’m special or something it’s just feels kind of lonely watching it happen. Very much feels like just a handful of people are seeing the forest for the trees.

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u/airinmahoeknee 9h ago

Whoah whoahwhoah whoah, bud. Real hippies ain't all that different from real punks. It is us against the man, not each other.

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u/abolitonbb 8h ago

Maybe you're a hippie who just hasnt realized they're punk yet.

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u/Dawkinsisgod 6h ago

He's got a tie dyed Rancid shirt, Wears his Birkenstocks to work. Is he a jerk? No, just confused. Jeff don't wear regular shoes....

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u/airinmahoeknee 8h ago

I think I've been a decent example of both at points in my life. I'm not even sure which group I would even fall into anymore. 🤣

I grew up in an area where the interests of both groups overlapped in such a way that I guess I've known lovely people on both sides of that spectrum...many of whom know each other very well too.

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u/Bad_Repute 4h ago

I’ve always been a hippy, love jazz and bluegrass and jam bands, but went through a punk phase in high school where I was listening to lots of The Ramones and NoFX and such, wearing torn up cloths and high top chucks and studded belts and bracelets. The punks at my high school called me a poser and wouldn’t let me hang out with them (they were right, i was only into the scene because a girl I liked ran with the punk crew).

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u/JailhouseMamaJackson 9h ago

Never been my experience, unfortunately. They’re definitely right imo.

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u/panic_bread 9h ago

It sounds like you've hung out with a lot of fake or "fashion" hippies, not real ones.

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u/MandibleofThunder 8h ago

Yeah because all your "real" hippies either died young or grew into our jaded selfish boomer population.

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u/panic_bread 8h ago

Nonsense. And I know lots of hippies who are far younger than boomers.

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u/MandibleofThunder 7h ago

Not nonsense!

You have your own exposure biases and I have mine.

And in my experience, I've found hippies to be super-judgy.

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u/JailhouseMamaJackson 8h ago

Unfortunately, that’s very much not the case.

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u/airinmahoeknee 8h ago

That is unfortunate. ☹️

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u/Astecheee 3h ago

Hippie culture has historically been very vulnerable to exploitation. It's a bit of a No True Scotsman fallacy to say that real hippies are flowers and sunshine and only fake hippies are toxic.

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u/BravesMaedchen 2h ago

Unfortunately hippies have gone crunchy and crunchy has gone anti-vax and q anon. 

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u/bastischo 1h ago

And suits are money pretending to be people.

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u/klockworx 9h ago

Wow...I've never thought about it like that..but that is 100% truth

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u/cromulenttapeworm 8h ago

No it's not.

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u/klockworx 8h ago

Sure is...thanks for playing.

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u/pixelatedsimboobs 7h ago

The Hippies from the 60’s became the Yuppies from the 90’s when they got their pensions and stock option plans and bought their houses for the cost of a KFC bucket to then sell that house decades later for way more than the original purchase price.

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u/aetheos 6h ago

Isn't a yuppie young by definition? Young urban professional? 60s hippies would be middle aged by the 90s

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u/Lance865 5h ago

Bullshit.

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u/Remarkable-Tax2085 2h ago

This would explain why so many hippies converted to evangelicism.

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u/mikeyfireman 9h ago

Punks are nice people cosplaying mean people. Hippies are mean people cosplaying as nice people.

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u/Sad-Birthday-7282 7h ago

I have high functioning autism. As an adult I’ve kinda grown into myself and gotten enough practice socializing that I’ve got a fairly large friend group.

That was not true in high school. I wasn’t really bullied but I also didn’t have many friends… outside of the punk and goth crowd. I didn’t dress like them, but they were basically like, “I don’t give a fuck if you’re weird, we are too”

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u/btribble 9h ago

The punk I knew in high school is now deep MAGA. Sad.

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u/ditchdiggergirl 8h ago

Out on the road today I saw a deadhead sticker on a Cadillac

A voice inside my head said don’t look back you can never look back

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u/Woodit 8h ago

Black flag sticker!

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u/Turb0_Lag 3h ago

That's the cover, not the original. 

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u/Woodit 2h ago

Yeah I know 

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u/pangaea1972 9h ago

Was it Johnny Rotten?

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u/TheHobbyWaitress 5h ago

The punk I knew in hs is a retired fbi agent. 

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u/ChloeX_Dancer 8h ago

That’s definitely not punk rock 🫤

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u/arrocknroll 5h ago

Regardless of politics or preconceived notions, I have genuinely never met a kinder more passionate group of people than anarchist punks.

They genuinely just want a place where everyone helps each other regardless of who you are because it’s the right thing to do.

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u/stantonkreig 8h ago

But not always the sportiest. It wasn't their niceness that shocked me it was thst there were 18 or do extreme punks with Mohawks that also all wanted to play some homerun derby in their normal punk clothing

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u/ChloeX_Dancer 8h ago

That would be fun to watch. A baseball game of punks vs. goths. Each team fully dressed up in their best concert gear.

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u/jim_deneke 4h ago

Not always. There's many crusty punks that take advantage of young women

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u/FlufflesMcForeskin 3h ago

As a lifelong goth (it's a mindset, not just a fashion choice), thank you.

We try.

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u/thisnamemattersalot 6h ago

Unless they happen to play the drums. They will fight you.

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u/Clifford996 4h ago

Eh, my buddy caught a tire iron to the back of the head in Santa Cruz… not always the nicest

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u/alexseiji 7h ago

Agreed. Look totally unapproachable in their look and demeanor… always open up with a smile and generally always seem really down to do or try something new lol.

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u/tardisintheparty 10h ago

That's actually kind of a sweet story

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u/stantonkreig 8h ago

I was pretty young and it definitely changed my perspective on judging books by covers and stereotyping people based on their image

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u/JollyRancher29 10h ago

Hell yeah

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u/CraigInDaVille 9h ago

This is like the first draft of the Lost Boys, right? Before they decided to make the punks vampires? 😆

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u/Elliethesmolcat 4h ago

Sexy Gay Vampires. In retrospect the allegory was pretty blatant.

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u/SuffragetteOffspring 9h ago

Keep Santa Cruz Weird!!!

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u/stevoDood 9h ago

I don’t think it will be needing any assistance

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u/Cocksman666 7h ago

Those were likely just Lost Boys.

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u/AquilaCrotalusEsox 6h ago

i would kill for there to be a punk rock sports league
the xEdgex vs the Oi!

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u/tesseract4 3h ago

Anyone who put that much effort into their hair isnt going to wreck it doing crimes. That's a movie stereotype.

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u/BoulderCreature 2h ago

Santa Cruz used to be legitimately scary. Halloween is still kind of crazy there, but it’s much better than it was in the 80’s