As someone who has grown up in a vaguely hippyish climate - the area I live in is basically the place most hippies migrated to at the end of the '60's - may I say that Ditko has most likely never even TALKED to a hippy? Sure, a lot of hippies were dropouts and airheads and whatnot, but one of their central tenets is that they believed in a better world - peace, love, all that stuff, you know? I don't think they'd be exactly the target audience for Boris Ebar - he's talking hopelessness, while they were all about hope. The people who'd be listening to him would be more likely to be proto-Goths, beatniks, whoever they had back then that were the equivalent of the thick-eyeshadow-and-bad-poetry crowd - the people, in short, who were inclined to be depressed ANYWAY. If the hippies had one major flaw, it would've been that they were too OPTIMISTIC, not the other way around. Also, the whole mugging thing is just preposterous. Of COURSE the mugger is in the wrong - he's lurking in an alleyway waiting to club someone over the head and take their money! Yet Ditko is putting arguments in his mouth that would be quite reasonable coming from a genuinely innocent person who can't get money but needs it - a welfare mom, for instance, or a homeless man who no one will hire. 'Get a job or starve' are not the only two options - what about someone who's inherited his money, and never worked a day in his life? He didn't EARN it, the worthless bum! Yet does that mean he needs to be thrown out on the streets? What about someone who CAN'T work, someone who's paralyzed or retarded or otherwise rendered incapable of making a living? Being self-sufficient is a marvelous thing, but some people aren't or can't be, and that's just the way the world is. And Mr. A? I can't understand a word you're saying. 'If there are no blacks or whites, then there cannot even be a gray' - true enough. 'Gray equals black', on the other hand - wha'?