Hmmm, so it only takes Juan Mann to change the world....

When the livestock husbandry designer Temple Grandin was a young girl, she craved hugs, but as an autistic, she became too stressed from physical contact with actual people.  Instead, she found inspiration in a piece of livestock equipment called a 'squeeze chute", which would inflate bladders to hold cattle still while they were branded.  The pressure of the chute also had a calming effect on cattle after the brand was applied.

Grandin took the concept and invented the hug machine, based on the same principle as the squeeze chute, but for use on autistic people.  Apparently, steady pressure all over the body is enough to calm down a person, regardless of who or what is giving it.

(is 3fingerspointback)

Without my consent, that's assault, isn't it?

Hugs are a very personal and affectionate way fo connecting with people.  When you hug a loved one, you can feel their heart beat and their warmth, and their desire to connect when they hug you back.  When you hug a stranger, it is an awkward yet humbling social experiment that usually spreads some good will.  (I have hugged strangers before and it was pleasant.)

But the negatives of hugs are real too.  Close contact with people, shaking hands, being in confined spaces and close body contact makes people into germ vectors.  You hug lots of strangers, you will increase your chances of getting the flu or a cold or some other nasty contagion.  And if you try to hug a mentally disturbed operson or a person prone to violence, you never know what could happen.  Instead of feeling all warm and fuzzy inside, they may want to slice you up into little pieces.  But hey, live is filled with risks.  You will likely catch the flu or a cold in your lifetime, from touching a doorknob, you are likely to experience some form of violence in your lifetime whether you give random hugs or not.  

I think this is the silliest thing I've seen in a long time.  The single-most last thing I want to happen as I'm on my way somewhere is to be invited to hug some patchouli-wearing pseudo-hippie who very likely has Mom's credit card in their wallet.  Worse yet, grabbed by such a person.  But given the videos, that isn't really happening.  It's more an invitation.  Oh, and by the way, try to spring for something more than a used pizza box and a crayon for your signs, mm'kay?

I definitely feel the frustration about the world that seems to be the basis for this movement/trend.  We are way, way too angry at each other for so many bad reasons.  But I think conversation, diplomacy, and creative thinking will go a much longer way to solving our global problems than a momentary lapse of sanity that causes two complete strangers to put breast-to-breast.

Finally, as a GenXer, I automatically react to anything "hippie".  We owe the hippie movement a lot, don't get me wrong.  But it was right for its own time.  Not so much this one, I think.  These Millennials (aka. GenY) seem to be romaticizing their parents' past and buying into any nostagia within.  Let's move on.  Let's use a new strategy more tailor-made to our time.  We have access to information and each other unlike the hippies ever dreamed (well, maybe in an acid-ridden stupor someone came up with the idea to talk to someone else in India using a funny box on their desktop, but that's just conjecture), so let's integrate that.  At the very least, produce your signs on a printer for pete's sake.

"Did you see that?" he asked, excitedly. "My thought just hit your jacket and then floated to the ground like my favorite piece of cheese!"