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."
“Don’t know about you, but I’d take what we had in the 60s any day.”
My cousin and I were just talking today about how, in the early 70’s, her mother would drop us off DOWNTOWN before work in the morning and pick us up after work in the evening.
We would have about $5-$10 each, and would browse stores and shop at Woolworths and have lunch somewhere together.
We were both about 10 YEARS OLD!
I can’t imagine letting my children ever do that these days. By contrast, I stand vigilant outside the public restroom door when my 8 year old son goes inside.
But as far as this article goes (and what the other poster is talking about) is that America started its downhill descent around this time. Maybe it was moving downhill before the “Summer of Love”, but it certainly sped up around then.
Yeah, then they moved to Santa Fe and Taos
I guess I have a really bad view of 'boomers' 'cuz I grew up in New Mexico with the worst of 'em.
I had a clever comment, but I can’t remember it now. Those fine looking T Shirts distracted me.
New Mexico.Beautiful state.
Yeah,many urban hippies migrated to that area for the country living.Yet they brought a lot of their bad habits with them.
"Hippie Hippie Shake" is the refrain lyric in the B-52's "Dance This Mess Around".
Would that we would have a Summer of Love in 2007! A summer where people would love and serve OTHERS, not themselves.
Bad karma, dude.
Zodiac murders - 1968-1969 - San Francisco, CA - Five murders over 10-month period.
Manson Murders - 1969 - three "events", 7 victims, plus a few others related to the trial of Manson Family members
Richard Speck murders - 1966 - Eight victims, student nurses.
Charles Whitman/Texas Tower shootings - 1966 - Sixteen victims dead, dozens wounded.
Kitty Genovese murder - 1964 - Queens, NY.
Race Riots...
Rochester, NY - 1964
Philadelphia, PA - 1964
New York City, NY - 1964
Watts Riots - Los Angeles, CA - August 1965
San Francisco, CA - 1966
Cleveland, OH - 1966
Detroit, MI - 1967
Newark, NJ - 1967
Baltimore, MD - 1967
Baltimore, MD - 1968
New York, NY - 1968
Washington, DC - 1968 Chicago, IL - 1968
Bobby Kennedy assassination - 1968
Martin Luther King assassination - 1968
Not to mention the many KKK bombings, etc. during the 60s.
I know that I am likely forgetting many other horrific crimes and unpeaceful events from that era in which I grew up. It certainly wasn't an all peace and love and everybody can sleep with their doors unlocked kind of era. As we age, we tend to forget the bad stuff and remember the better memories - keeps us from going nuts ourselves, I suppose.
That is so LIFE magazine and plastic.
I think every 15 to 30 year old is narcissistic ... just part of being a member of the longest maturing of God's creation.
Be careful what you wish for. Reagan was from Illinois. Barak Obama represents Illinois.
Then on came the usual slew of ads for expensive cars and brokerages with The Who, Iron Butterfly and a bunch of other boomer music, then on came the onslaught of Cialis and Viagra ads for boomer boners, then on came the evening news for boomers by boomers....
And it struck me: "My God, everything I see, read or hear is designed to reinforce the boomer worldview and sense of importance! They have the money and the clout now and there is a lot of them!"
It's your world, I just live in it.
Hang loose, dude .... your turn is comin' ... and you're gonna' love it!
Hell, we have Manson style murders every week now in 2007.
Not to mention little kids, teenagers etc being grabbed at the malls, school yards, and neighhoods *daily*.
Did I say daily?
Ever hear of *daily* drive by shootings in the 60s? Tens of thousands of brutal gangs? Millions of illegal aliens entering our lawless borders in the 60s?
I never did.
LOL, all the neighborhood kids where we lived played outside on summer nights. I am talking little kids 6 and 7 up to the teens....Without the parents living every minute in fear if their little girls would be raped and cut into pieces in their own neighborhoods for Gods sake.
Ever watch the news nowadays? It's nothing short of a daily nightmare.
Better yet, don't watch it.
By the time I’m old enough to “love it”, the Boomers will have drained the world dry and left it a husk — just as they leave behind everything else they touch.
Locusts. Human locusts.
Any life or way of life that sucks is because of the power people.
Hippies hated power ... it was the root of all evil in the world.
World view is everything, and if you can get to "Yea, hath God said ... ?", you'll find the frailty of humanity and the power of evil.
I love my life, I love my kids, I love my job and I love America.
I'm here because people other than myself have things to say that provoke thought and it is hoped someone just might be able to propose a process that will straighten things out ... but then ... I've read the last book.
Earth loses and only the saved go to heaven.
The rest to hell.
Bravo zulu!
Thanks for the retro 80s trip down memory lane.
I graduated high school in ‘82 and the 80s were the formative years of my life.
I really liked the B52s and I still listen to them when I’m nostalgic...
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