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."
As they say in my generation: "Whatever."
Didn’t Rod Serling do just that?
Spielberg doesn’t belong in the same trough with Moore as he has celebrated American culture throughout his career.
Sure, there’s a solution, but the first step is to recognize that everything you have eloquently worshipped in this thread is wrong at one level or another.
I believe your sanity has suffered.
You had to be 21 to vote in 1964. That would put the youngest voters as being born in 1943. Not a single hippie or baby boomer cast a vote in that election.
So the 'Greatest Generation' were weird old socialists?
No wonder Tom Brokow likes them.
I guess there was really no such thing as hippies, Steven Spielberg celebrates American Values and Nancy Pelosi is a conservative....
You're right, the crime rate, tax rate, interest rate, divorce rate and American Malaise was really increased by the 9 year old Gen-Xers in 1976.
For the Baby Boomer, every President is Nixon, every war is Vietnam, every governor is George Wallace, every black politician is Martin Luther King, every wife is barefoot and pregnant, every homosexual orgy is the Stonewall Riot and every March is the March on Selma.
I, and my cohort, will never achieve such wide-eyed never aging perfection. If your erection lasts more than four hours seek medical attention.
Ouch! As my teenage gamer son would say, "Sick burn!"
Huh? I stated the chronological fact that LBJ was elected in 1964 mostly by WW2 vets and their parents. I don’t know where you got that other stuff. And SS does celebrate American values in his work.
This very same "Greatest Generation" was funding their kids' stay in the Haight. These kids virtually all got checks from home, in addition to what they made by panhandling and selling drugs. And their thinking had been shaped by teachers and professors much older than they, who seemed to be living out their "rebellions" vicariously through these kids, who were free to sleep around, use drugs, act irresponsibly, etc. in a way that they felt they had been deprived of doing.
A lot of it had to do with the influence of Freudian psychology in the academic world, although the United States has always had a fondness for the image of the noble savage, unfettered by society, that was similar to the (as popularized) Freudian idea that everybody was busy repressing all sorts of things and had to let go of their repressions and let it all hang out. Universities acquired a number of German and French professors around the time of WWII, many of them both Marxist and Freudian in their orientation, who were very influential in molding the academic climate that would later influence hippie "thought."
So while this stuff was always bubbling along underneath in American liberalism (look at Dewey's educational theories), I think it took the influence of European theories, plus the presence of a previously undreamt of level of affluence, to produce the social melt-down that occurred.
"I believe your sanity has suffered."
Prove it.
There is far more evidence of unicorns and dragons than of the “noble savage”.
Oh, and the solution relies upon educating people.
The children of today are not being educated. They are being indoctrinated.
They are not being taken down the path of study that answers the question “why”...and teaches them to find the answer to that question, but instead tells them *what* to think.
By way of example I offer the favorite of the Flower Children’s vises: Sex. They are indoctrinated to believe, as it happens, that sex is something they are going to do whether they want to or not, so they might as well give in to those feelings. It’s hormonal, and they are animals...this is the message....Therefore get a condom from the nurse’s office, nevermind the fact that the child is 12 or 13 years of age.
They are also told, beginning in Kindergarten in some cases, that there is no difference between heterosexuality and homosexuality while deftly ignoring that men and women are different, but homosexuality and a plethora of other fetishes and paraphilias have astonishingly *few* differences.
You don’t know me.
If you did not write about yourself, your thoughts, your memories, and were not waxing nostolgic about the immorality of your past...no.
But then, that would beg the question of why you would create such fictions in the first place.
The internet political forums are wonderful places. Stripped away are the superficialities of race, age, appearance, wealth, and all the emotional trappings one encounters in face-to-face meetings. Thus, when you write, you more completely lay bare your thoughts than when you, say, share a coffee at Starbucks in your Berkenstocks.
At least we’ve put the lie to that bit about open minds.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1851750/posts?page=63#63
Ya gone an’ letcher brains drip out...and now your mind is closed to the fact that you were wrong. Everything about that time was wrong, and harmful to the nation.
Too true. But those in love with the idea of the noble savage will never admit it.
Hillary! needs a writer.
Nope, It doesn’t matter 40 years ago, 60 years ago, 100 years ago, 1000 years ago.
That behavior is harmful to the society in which it was engaged.
It’s time to recognize the fact and feel shamed by your actions rather than wax nostalgic about it.
Oh...and please, it’s Mrs. Bill Clinton. She isn’t anybody without Slick Willie.
You're cancer.
Some posit that is not far wrong as many of that generation rejected traditional child raising and opted for Dr. Spock. Up until the time of his book his methods were definately not the norm.
A lot of parents paid attention, it was, after all, a time of science, technology and "modern" methods. His book has only been outsold by the Bible.
Of course blaming ones parents for ones shortcomings is silly but I'm not sure that a lot of that generation think there's any reason to place blame.
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