Posted on 06/17/2007 12:07:44 PM PDT by DogByte6RER
Summer of love: 40 years later
Hippie Hippie Shakedown: But where was love?
BY DAWN EDEN, Guest Columnist
LA Daily News
WHEN it comes to inappropriate names, "Summer of Love" has to be right up there with "Joy Division," the name the Nazis reportedly gave to the sections of concentration camps that housed the guards' sex slaves.
For one thing, it was not just a summer event. The countercultural happening that swept through San Francisco and beyond began with an April1967 planning announcement by concert promoter Chet Helms, aka Family Dog, creating the "Council for the Summer of Love."
It still goes on today in the burned-out minds of its rapidly fading survivors, remnants of the thousands of teens who ran away to find Love in San Francisco, only to wind up wasted on a street whose name sounds like hate.
Where, indeed, was the love in the San Francisco of Helms, the Diggers, the San Francisco Oracle, and other Summer of Love organizers, of whom so many have died young?
Helms would later boast on his Web site that the event "sowed the seeds of a compassionate idealism which still lives in the hearts of many of our own and subsequent generations." He pointed to the organizers' efforts to feed the runaways. Other Summer of Love chroniclers note that the Haight Ashbury Free Clinics, founded in the summer of 1967, still help the needy today.
The irony is that there would have been no need to feed those runaways, nor to care for so many drug abusers, alcoholics and venereal-disease victims, had Helms - who succumbed to hepatitis C at 63 - and his compatriots not encouraged youths to flood San Francisco. And for what, exactly? Drugs, to be sure, and "free love" - "free," as opposed to the kind that costs money, apparently.
Thanks to the Pill and a counterculture that defined rebellion as annoying one's parents, thousands of youths became guinea pigs in a kind of mass experiment propagated by prurient Beat Generation relics such as Helms, Allen Ginsberg (died at 70, hepatitis and liver cancer) and Ken Kesey (died at 66, liver cancer). They were told that they would overcome the superficial consumerism in which they had been raised, reaching a higher spiritual level by uniting their minds to drugs and their bodies to willing takers. Instead, they themselves became products to be consumed - victimized by pushers, treated as sexual objects to be disposed of, or corrupted into predators.
It boggles the mind to think what the Summer of Love's sad victims could have accomplished if, rather than seeking to fulfill their own juvenile desires, they had aimed to create a true culture of love. Instead, in following their leaders' urging to do their own thing, they found themselves locked in a society that gave them all the restrictions of communal life - poverty, squalor, and social pressure to self-destruct - and few of the protections.
At the celebrated Be-Ins and Love-Ins, the mob ruled, while - like those Playboy cartoons of orgies where one person's orifice is indistinguishable from another's - the individual was subsumed.
Meanwhile, one corner of the culture, recognizing the counterculture's threat to the individual, composed a clarion call for the restoration of human dignity. A work in progress during the Summer of Love, published the following summer, it attacked those who, in pursuing solutions to overpopulation and other contemporary concerns, put forth "an utterly materialistic conception of man himself and his life." Instead, it urged world powers to develop a solution "which envisages the social and economic progress both of individuals and of the whole of human society, and which respects and promotes true human values."
That's real love.
However, when those words of Pope John XXIII, quoted in Pope Paul VI's "Humanae Vitae," emerged in 1968, few of the hippies bothered to read them, let alone follow them as far as they led. All they knew was the five-word condensation of the encyclical that appeared on a popular poster, underneath an image of the Pope pointing his finger Uncle Sam-style: "The Pill Is a No-No."
Supporters of the hippies' objectives argue that they and future generations benefited from the dismantling of repressive Eisenhower-era values that restricted sex to marriage. Well, say what you will about a culture that presumed women found their highest fulfillment in motherhood, but one doesn't see many repressed housewives panhandling on modern-day Haight Street. One does see lost geriatric flower children with stringy hair and rotten teeth who contracepted or aborted the children who could have taken care of them in their old age.
Years after the Summer of Love's Bay Area invasion, a more moneyed class of Californians popularized a term that parallels what the hippies accomplished: garbage in/garbage out. The true measure of the success of the Love-In is the love that came out.
Today, the counterculture's victims are dying with few children to mourn them - at least, few who are willing to speak to parents who put their own desires ahead of their children's. It is the end of a long, bad trip.
Dawn Eden is director of the Cardinal Newman Society's Love and Responsibility Program. She is author of "The Thrill of the Chaste: Finding Fulfillment While Keeping Your Clothes On."
More like the entrepreneural spirit of three guys.
Yes, but according to some, the "hippies" of 40 years ago, are the cause of all the problems today. Murders, drive-bys, mass shootings, illegal aliens, Muslim fanatics that want to kill us, sadistic child murderers etc, lawless borders, why Mom and Dad both have to work 85 plus hours a week just to pay a mortgage, fuel prices, etc
Speaking of crap.
having lived through all those events you mention .. when you think of the big social divide/upheaval, really was all after the JFK assassination. Honestly, it was really much more civil till before that. In my mind, I think of the 60’s as almost two very distinct decades .. earry 60’s and late 60’s.
Wasn’t it ‘63 also that the SCOTUS banned prayer in school? Then so many things went on simultaneously, the Civil Rights struggles, the Great Society, the VN anti-war/hippie movement, the women’s movement. Very tumultuous times. And we’re still paying!
We'll one thing for sure, it wasn't the boomers or the hippies that punched holes in JFK, if you're suggesting the JFK hit was more less a kicking off point to what we have today.
Of course not! The law and order structures of the country hadn't been destroyed yet by the politically correct ideas of the 1968 New Left.
You have to sow before you can reap. The seeds for this current lawlessness was sewn on a hundred college campuses and in millions of white middle class homes 40 years ago.
Now we are reaping the whirlwind.
You bet, our entire country has been undermined by few long haired hippies from 40 years ago.
Nancy Pelosi; John Kerry; Carl Levin; Bill and Hillary Clinton; Al Gore; Chuck Shumer; Barbara Boxer; Dianne Feinstein....
They certainly have a death-grip on power now!
It's beyond hypocritical, it's evil.
that’s not what I was suggesting at least as you seem to have read it ... unless, perhaps the change of Administration and the focus that LBJ had was part of it. Don’t you have to agree that that is a strong possibility?
LBJ thrust the Great Society on us, creating a dependency we’d never known and couldn’t have imagined. Illegitimacy spiraled out of control thanks to his Great SOciety. Vast illegitimacy begets crime. LBJ pursued the VietNam war in a way no prior CinC had, helping to give rise to the anti-war left.
IF I had to pinpoint the change, yep, it goes to the assassination. And the more catastrophic change of Administration that immediately followed.
Agree. And yet LBJ wasn't a boomer, and I don't think he was hippy either.
Who are now in charge: Nancy Pelosi; Chuck Shumer; Bill Clinton' Hillary!; Dianne Feinstein; John Kerry; Al Gore....
All children of the 60's all products of the New Left.
As a group they have done more to destroy law and order in this country through legislation and confiscatory taxation than any generation in history.
No, but somebody had to vote for him.
No, but somebody had to vote for him.
So let me get this straight, your suggesting LBJ was elected President by baby boomers and hippies?
Man, this is the funniest thought I've had all night.
No, of course not. The lefties all voted for Goldwater you nitwit.
Good evening...
Can’t. I’d turn to stone look at Her Heinous’ Gorgonesque countenance..
They weren’t the greatest generation, because they raised the worst. They failed. It was the 1st Dr. Spock generation.
Of course teenagers didn’t invent it, but they swallowed it whole. They “innovated” the invention - which is the more important thing.
If a few nutcases from the Silent Gen or “Greatest” (cough cough) Gen had no bands of followers, they would remain “a few nutcases”.
It took a bunch of spoiled-rotten (by the GG) brats to suck up the idea that they should continue to be spoiled and do anything they wanted. They were the true spreaders of the disease.
Best part.
They aren’t, weren’t hippies ... they were, are 60’s radicals ... SDS.
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