Now, I wasn’t in San Francisco in the summer of 1967. There was a little thing I had to do in Texas for the U.S. Air Force. But I knew kids who put flowers in their hair and went to the Haight area and were transformed by the experience, and not in a good way.
The San Francisco Chronicle is celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love in a four-part series. Today’s first installment delves into the transformation of an old Victorian neighborhood into a hippie magnet. Things soon went down hill, drastically, something often forgotten in the sanitized version of that summer.
Two comments jumped out at me in this story. The first is from Peter Coyote, an actor who was a founding member of The Diggers, a hippie collective:
“If you look at all the political agendas of the 1960s, they basically failed,” says actor Peter Coyote, who belonged to a Haight-Ashbury commune called the Diggers in the late ’60s. “We didn’t end capitalism. We didn’t end imperialism. We didn’t end racism. Yeah, the war ended. But if you look at the cultural agendas, they all worked.”
The other comment, from a former beat poet, says if it weren’t for that Summer of Love and the cultural offshoots it spawned, that we’d all be in a bigger world of hurt:
“If these young people hadn’t declared the possibility of a new culture, a new family,” says beat poet Michael McClure, “a new tribe, believing in peace, nature, sexuality, the positive use of psychedelic drugs — if they hadn’t been there to broaden and deepen the hundreds of thousands and then millions of people who were broadened and deepened by this — we would be in an even bigger stew.”
Coyote seems not to understand that the cultural IS the political. And McClure seems oblivious to the damage the Summer of Love and the “do your own thing” mentality did to every aspect of our country, from culture to politics.
