Good article! I was in SF that summer and what I saw was appalling. I remember that one poor girl was raped to death in a bathtub by druggies in the Haight; the streets were filled with middle class kids strung out on whatever, begging and prostituting themselves, and it was virtually an everyday thing to see somebody on a bad trip trying to jump off a roof.
But I beg to differ. The Greatest Generation may have been the earlier crop of those who were drafted and fought in WWII, but the really creepy theory behind all of these things - ranging from drug use to total sexual chaos - came from people who were older than the young people of the 60s - that is, members of the “Greatest Generation.”
Timothy Leary was not a teenager; neither were any of the horrible Marxist philosophers who corrupted American education. Many of them were left-wing Europeans who had come here prior to WWII, but they were received with great joy by American universities, and the younger faculty adopted all of their positions. This includes members of the “Greatest Generation” who had come home and gone through school on the GI Bill and were teaching teenagers in the late 50s and early 60s. That was where I heard most of the garbage I heard at that time: from the “Greatest Generation.”
Charles Manson was well into his mid-30s when his "family" committed the Tate/LaBianca murders.
I think he was born in 1934 or '35.
LOL! This was not the norm. Today we have middle class house wifes downing their 5 kids in the bath tub. We have daily drive by brutal shootings in every city in America. Daily!
It is so common in todays America, it don't even make the freaking news unless 30 people are murdered at one time. Every week we read about insane, brutal murders and almost monthly work place, and school mass shootings etc.
Again, I'd take what we had in the 60s any day over what we are left with today.
Would you even think of letting your 7 year old girl play outside with other little kids, after dark in the summer time in todays America? I think not.
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.