The Summer of Love? 50 Years Hence…

The Greatest Generation…
No, the Parents who survived the Depression and slammed down Hitler and Tojo in WWII.
Those men came home. Their women didn’t ask many questions. Marriages occasioned and babies were birthed by the millions — the Baby Boomer Generation.
Given everything their parents never had as kids, those kids grew up in middle class bliss and got bored. They saw the Work Ethic in their parents and wanted a lodge poll between them and It.
Enter drugs.
Enter an excuse to ditch real life.
Enter the Summer of ’67.
Location: Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, “SoCal” — the birthplace of everything extraordinary under sun, sand and surf.
Kids flocked. Parents panicked, or just plain gave up hope.
Leary, a guru coming literally out of nowhere, told the teen kiddies to “Turn on, tune in, drop out!” and like any addict yearning for an enabler, needing an excuse to do nothing, and under the guise of a “Better Way”, they did precisely that.
I’m four years old that summer, Baby Boomer, yes, but barely. From my tiny toddler vantage point, I thought my Dad looked dapper in his made-to-measure business suits and Brylcreem, and my mom, so ladylike in her white day gloves.
And as it turned out, I liked baths.
Age four, fourteen or twenty four, even a truckload of Barbie-dolls wouldn’t have made me see the Hippie laziness as anything close to “Flower Power”.
Back then, the “straight” world (remember back when all that meant was square) thought they were being over-run by home-grown aliens. In ’67, Elvis took a break from production of his ’68 Comeback Special and took a stroll down Sunset Boulevard, in public with no body guards, and nobody recognized him, or if they did, they didn’t care. He was one of “them”, the hippies thought. A grandpa rocker. The Establishment. A decade earlier, community leaders were breaking E’s vinyls in two, declaring, “Be gone with thy Swivel-hipped Devil!”
Looking back now, you can see how this psychedelic boomerang would eventually hit those kids in their butts. Their belief: don’t do anything you don’t want to do! Free food! Free love! Free dope! (It’s interesting how none of those drugged up kids ever wondered who would make their clothes, their records or their cars…or plant the crops to grow their free food???)
And of course, in less than 6 months, the Haight in San Fran grew from a small village among a city into a city of a 100 grand, and soon that free food was not merely enjoyed but begged for, their utopian society ultimately caving in on itself. No place to sleep. No place to bathe. No place to love. No place to Be.
Theft. Fights. Crime. And as Charlie Manson would have it — murder. It all came in like a seaside storm that shoves summer away for winter’s curse, and the daisy-chains died, and the spoiled rich kids ran out of Daddy’s money, and tired of begging, everybody who had original good intentions left; save for the “straight” tourists who came to The Bay by the tour busload to gawk and to take Kodak camera pics of “those strange beings by the sea”…
It’s damn hard to believe a half century has gone by…people, places, all just rose-coloured sun-glass memories now. Sure, in 2017 you can stroll down the Haight. I’m sure diehard senior hippies will return to their nesting grounds this summer to take dope and remember the good ol’ days. Only this time, the dancing, prancing and sexual frolicking will be dampened by canes, walkers, wheelchairs and arthritis. Even hippies can never really go Home.

For me, that summer, that belief, finally came crashing down on me when shortly before his death, actor/drug dealer/anarchist/Easy Rider guru, Dennis Hopper, was in a TV commercial flogging an investment firm. I don’t know how his fellow hippie seniors felt about that, but to me that was Dennis’s subliminal message to the rest of us better bathed individuals that their generation screwed up. And screwed up big.
Sure, tree huggers are good. We need them. They keep the litter down and the recycling up and theoretically love their neighbours, but all I see now are the grey-haired aging children of the Greatest Generation who secretly know now their Summer of Love was really a summer of laziness, and no more.
David Crosby, of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young said it best (paraphrased),
Hippies on drugs. We were conducting a science experiment. We all died. The experiment failed.
Now those freedom failing kiddies have had kiddies of their own. They’ve given them everything they themselves thought they lacked back then.
Another spoiled lot. Another batch of entitled brats.
50 years on…well…Jesus…
I miss the Greatest Generation.
Please Hit The Heart if you enjoyed my Op-Ed of Woe. I’m of Irish descent, rarely do we weave Whee! 😏
