A few months ago I was standing in line waiting to be served in a health food shop. I couldn't help but overhear the conversation that was in full flow between the woman who worked behind the till and the customer she was serving. The subject was crystals and their healing powers.
The cashier said to the customer: "I've got crystals all over the house and the garden. You can never have too many crystals I say!".
Upon hearing this mini polemic, part of my soul died.
A few years back, in a pub, a young hippy approached a few of my friends and me. We'd been to a festival and were dressed a bit hippy and he placed a wooden box with some sort of magical symbol carved on the lid, which he opened to reveal a selection of healing crystals of various types, set into cheap silver jewelry, each with a little price tag attached, before launching into a full-on, weapons grade earth mysteries/leylines/orgone/cosmic consciousness spiel.
As we occasionally asked him to explain the finer points of each crystal and the powers it supposedly possessed, he started to realise his mistake - hippies we may have been, but among our number were two physicists, a geneticist, a materials scientist, a geologist (whose PhD, as it happened, had involved crystalline structures in igneous rock) and an archaeologist. Nevertheless, he continued and heroically made it to the end of his pitch so we told him that although we weren't going to buy any crystals, we would buy him drinks if he wanted to get drunk with us - and after a couple, he admitted he thought the whole crystal healing energy thing is a load of bollocks.
I sometimes wonder if he's still out there selling bullshit, or if inspired by us he took up the good fight against woo!
@Jnei
Who would have thought hippies could be such capitalists. I like the way you bought him drinks at the end. Humanity triumphs.