Flowers in Their Hair (the Summer of Love disaster)

Weekly Standard ^ | 8/14/17 | Ferguson

[pabianice]

So what happened? If everyone agrees that the “experiment” in the Haight ended in a Hobbesian tar pit of crime and misery, what caused the failure?

The people who celebrate the Summer of Love prefer to find causes beyond the counterculture itself. Peter Lewis, a surviving member of the 1960s San Francisco band Moby Grape, finds the cause in geopolitics. “Always lurking below [the SOL] there was this seething hatred and fear from Vietnam and the Cold War.” The founder of the Haight clinic blames the “conservative element in American culture” and the distorting effects of the media’s superficial coverage of the Haight experiment. “The Haight Ashbury was decimated by hard drugs, essentially speed and heroin,” writes William Schnabel in Summer of Love and Haight. “The question is who introduced these drugs into the neighborhood and who had the means of producing them?” His tentative answer: the CIA, through distribution networks arranged by the mafia.

In all the celebrations of the Summer of Love, you will look in vain for a hint of remorse or self-blame. Not an “oops,” not a “yikes, I think we went a little overboard that time,” not a “boy, I’d like a do-over on 1967.” baby boomers, especially the ex-hippie division, are averse to second-guessing themselves. Nowhere in the literature have I found a hint of one explanation that is far more obvious and plausible than the others.

Which is this: The seeds of the destruction of the Haight experiment could be found in its own antinomianism, in its original inspiration. Maybe the wholesale rejection of time-honored and time-tested values — monogamy, moderation, good manners, self-denial, self-control, the sanctity of private property, personal accountability to higher authorities, both material and spiritual — leads to squalor and misery.

[pabianice]

Long article, good analysis.

[chajin]

If everyone agrees that the “experiment” in the Haight ended in a Hobbesian tar pit of crime and misery, what caused the failure?

Much shorter answer: sin.

You cannot recreate Eden, and you cannot make Heaven on Earth. When God installs the New Jerusalem, then and only then will the ideal life be found here.

[ABN 505]

Hippie chicks, yum yum. I was in the Haight Ashbury at the time but it was only when I got a weekend pass from Ft. Ord. Lots of interesting things going on there.

[wastoute]

I was not in San Fran at the the time but I was “there”. The way I remember it was I was protesting the possibility of being drafted and folks I knew were coming back seriously screwed up or dead. For a war in a place we didn’t understand and for reasons that weren’t real clear. At that age the threat of communism was not as clear as it is to me now. But agree with this much. I knew FAR more folks that were far more screwed up over amphetamine and heroin. Once I realized I wanted to actually accomplish something in life I put all that crap in the rear view and never looked back.

[Tax-chick]

And yet, many people seem to imagine that the free-fornication, yay-drugs, “live on the kindness of strangers” experiment is working out wonderfully on the national scale. Opioid-abuse epidemic? “Disability” crisis? Broken families? Means nowt.

[IronJack]

As usual, the Left blames the failure on structural flaws. Conservatives see it as a failure of individuals. No amount of good intentions is going to make bad people good. And a collective of bad people is going to be a bad collective. There's nothing magical about evil in bigger numbers. There's just more of it.

But if the individuals who comprise that collective are themselves responsible, honorable, decent people, then their collective aggregates their strengths and amplifies them.

So how do the individuals remain responsible, honorable, and decent? By being accountable. By stepping outside themselves into a bigger world that existed long before them and will exist long after they're gone. By admitting their own insignificance instead of elevating it to narcissism.

And the best way to do that is by religion: the recognition that you are a mere speck in time, a mote in the eye of the Creator, to whom you owe your very (transient) existence. Do away with religion and you do away with the drive to be moral. And the structure in which to do it.

God doesn't fail His people. His people fail Him. And themselves in the bargain.

[ImJustAnotherOkie]

The bottom line, is People will be People, and take what they want, when they want to, if they decide to. The trick is to make them not want it, or make it too risky to take.

[Robert A Cook PE]

Oh so true.
Today’s Washington democrats ARE those hippies and free-love, anti-American idealists they “thought” they were back in ‘67. Their entire lives have an effort re-create the illusions they were smoking back then.

[Tax-chick]

It's not just Democrats. A Republican who says anything about the public cost of fornication will be laughed out of the room, and, if he mentions morality, he'll be locked in the stairwell. It's nearly the same with drugs, now. The pravda is that all "choices" of "consenting adults" (and don't check ID ...), are harm- and cost-free.

As the article's author notes, "Summer of Love" is a catchy phrase for what was then called the counterculture and which is now, in many deep and surviving particulars, just the culture.

[morphing libertarian]

It wasn’t just the love that was free. lodging, drugs, food, clothes, medical care and the people kept pouring in. Even the originators bailed out of this social experiment. you can’t sustain a system of free stuff. Someone has to pay. We are seeing this again nationwide with Obama giving EBT cards, phones, and medical care and education to every and anyone including illegals. That to me is the lesson of the summer of love.

[dfwgator]

“Who Needs The Peace Corps?” - The Mothers of Invention

What’s there to live for?
Who needs the peace corps?
Think I’ll just DROP OUT
I’ll go to Frisco
Buy a wig & sleep
On Owsley’s floor

Walked past the wig store
Danced at the Fillmore
I’m completely stoned
I’m hippy & I’m trippy
I’m a gypsy on my own
I’ll stay a week & get the crabs &
Take a bus back home
I’m really just a phony
But forgive me
‘Cause I’m stoned

Every town must have a place
Where phony hippies meet
Psychedelic dungeons
Popping up on every street
GO TO SAN FRANCISCO . . .

How I love ya, How I love ya
How I love ya, How I love ya Frisco!
How I love ya, How I love ya
How I love ya, How I love ya
Oh, my hair is getting good in the back!

Every town must have a place
Where phony hippies meet
Psychedelic dungeons
Popping up on every street
GO TO SAN FRANCISCO . . .

Hotcha!

First I’ll buy some beads
And then perhaps a leather band
To go around my head
Some feathers and bells
And a book of Indian lore
I will ask the Chamber Of Commerce
How to get to Haight Street
And smoke an awful lot of dope
I will wander around barefoot
I will have a psychedelic gleam in my eye at all times
I will love everyone
I will love the police as they kick the shit out of me on the street
I will sleep . . .
I will, I will go to a house
That’s, that’s what I will do
I will go to a house
Where there’s a rock & roll band
‘Cause the groups all live together
And I will join a rock & roll band
I will be their road manager
And I will stay there with them
And I will get the crabs
But I won’t care
Because . . .

[TTFlyer]

Summer of Love marked the beginning of the end of the State of Kalifornia.

[pabianice]

There was never an anti-war movement in the 60s. There WAS a I DON’T WANT TO GO movement that was prettied up with flowers and drugs. After the draft ended — so did all the “Anti-war” demonstrations despite the war continuing to a communist victory. In the terror that followed in Vietnam and Cambodia, the “left” never said a word. Cowardly hypocrites.

[wastoute]

Guilty. I didn’t want to go. Funny, 15 years later I ended up as a Commisioned Officer. Thank God I never heard a shot fired in anger.

[wideminded]

The question is who introduced these drugs into the neighborhood and who had the means of producing them?”

I've always heard that the "summer of love" attracted biker gangs, who brought amphetamines into the mix.

[roadcat]

Hippie chicks, yum yum.

I was also there, having grown up in SF, I hung out in the Haight with friends. Miracle I did'nt catch diseases from the gals whose names I did'nt know. Too easy, watch free bands in the Panhandle park a block away from Haight, smoke dope and share wine with pretty hippie chicks and what ensues... but forget to get their names.

[Buckeye McFrog]

A couple of years ago I saw a horrifying documentary on the S.O.L.

They were interviewing veteran San Francisco police officers who were working there at the time. They recounted untold horrors. Young teen girls would get off the Greyhound from Iowa and start trekking across town. They’d have to cross all the crime-ridden hellhole neighborhoods of any city, where they fell prey to robbery and rape. Then horrifying cop eyewitness tales of young people strung out on acid jumping from windows. Hideous.
Scott McKenzie’s song sure wasn’t written from a cop’s point of view.

[Kenton]

Hippie chicks were easy.

[sparklite2]

tl;dr

The SOL was unsustainable, but so what? It was not a disaster.

[catnipman]

“monogamy, moderation, good manners, self-denial, self-control, the sanctity of private property, personal accountability to higher authorities, both material and spiritual” ... proper personal hygiene ...