Well, I was 12 years old during the Summer of Love, but I can recall vividly the positive and glowing commentary at the time from the media and, in fact, from most of the adults that I cared about. My best friend’s sister came back from college and talked with me about getting high with her boyfriend, whom she was living with, and I sat there transfixed by her long hair and peasant dresses. I listened to the low power FM station in New Haven under the bedsheets so my parents wouldn’t know about it. In other words, I was sucked in by the cool feeling that I was on the crest of the wave.
The changes did not come immediately. Instead, it was out there on the edge, tempting us as teenagers. Our high school still banned blue jeans in the dress code in 1969; by my senior year, a girl was thrown out for wearing a see-through blouse and a bunch of guys went streaking down the hall. It was also the same year that weed hit the school in a big way. We all followed Dylan and everybody must get stoned.
Another four years and my community was entirely transformed. There were pockets of discontent, of course, but just about everyone was getting high and being sexually active, right down to junior high. I remember coming back home in 1979 and being astonished at what the 15-year-old sister of that 1969 hippie girl was doing.
So my life went on, and through twists and turns, I am now sober and Christian, and a lot more grown up, and more than a little ashamed of my own participation in the 1970s endless party. The writer is correct. The Summer of Love was a disaster. I can see many people of my own era who were sucked up into the life of sex and debauchery and never came out. Some of us managed to merely waste years of our lives. Some of us lost our lives. The idea that drugs can bring about enlightenment and sex can be shared freely without consequence seem so completely wrong from this perspective that I can hardly believe anyone would accept those ideas. I’m willing to accept the idea that I was too young to know better, but the truth is that I thought at the time it was cool, and therefore signed up for the School of Hard Knocks before I knew better. (My wife, who was not raised in the United States, considers all this to be a sort of cultural madness that she is thankful for not experiencing first hand. We’ve also told our son point blank that there will be hell to pay if we catch him smoking weed and drinking beer.)
I think history will not be kind to the Summer of Love, either.
You and I are about the same age - I’m guessing I’m a year younger and perhaps luckily for me, all of my friends seemed to be “oldest” children w/o older siblings in college.
I was socially immature enough that the summer of love had come and gone by the time I might have been interested in participating, and by the jaded old age of 15, thanks to Ayn Rand, I decided that wasting my mind wasn’t what I wanted to do.
Beautiful response, redpoll.