Glittery texts by bigoo.ws ..
THE SUMMER OF LOVE
By Tim McManus --------------------------------------------School was out for the summer and hundreds of young people traveled across the country to San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district to become a part of a counter cultural phenomenon that some said would change the world. Others weren't so sure.
Still others cared only about scoring some acid (LSD) for the Jefferson Airplane show at the Fillmore auditorium.
The year was 1967 and those who'd come to San Francisco wore flowers in their hair as part of the Summer Of Love.The Summer of Love was a celebration of all things "hippy," a counter cultural movement that took off in the mid- to late-Sixties that urged mostly young white Americans to "turn on, tune in, and drop out" -- a phrase coined by LSD pioneer and enthusiast Timothy Leary. In other words, they were urged to remove themselves from society and experiment with psychedelic drugs, wear their hair long, dance at "acid rock" concerts and have promiscuous sex.
Tens of thousands of teens and adults crashed in San Francisco for three months that summer.
Many of these pilgrims were high school students who left their homes for the summer.
Fifteen-year-old Anastasia from Alexandria, Va., who arrived in San Francisco that summer told Stephen Golden of The New York Times she had come to Haight-Ashbury to "find out about" herself.
"There was a lot about myself that I didn't know and I wanted to find out," she said. "The people here are great and my chances of finding out are better here than in Alexandria."
Anastasia said she talked to her mother about her trip to San Francisco and her mom let her go, even giving her $30 for gas money and her 18-year-old sister's ID.
Anastasia said her mother "may be concerned because she let me come, but she knows where I am."
Golden wrote that Anastasia was just "one of an inestimable number of teenagers who have emigrated to the Haight this summer."
While hippies had their intellectual roots in the New Left movement of 1965 and the "Beat Generation" of the late 1950's, they abandoned many of the defining ideals of those movements.
They kept the ideas of disillusionment with society, but left behind the nihilism, pessimism and the cool jazz of the Beats. They kept the revolutionary spirit of the "New Left." The hippies were almost universally apolitical in their revolution.
Some hippies, again unlike the New Left, were not particularly interested in the Civil Rights Movement. According to a New York Times report by Martin Arnold, hippies often referred to blacks as "spades." Arnold quoted one hippy as saying, "The Negroes are fighting to become what we’ve rejected, and we don’t see any sense in that."
While the New Left just two years earlier encouraged militant responses as part of their outrage at the government and mainstream society, the hippies rejected society altogether and returned to nature. "Do your own thing" was a common hippie motto.
Hippies rejected being a part of the conventional economy, believing believed that everything should be shared and everything should be free.
A group called The Diggers, originally a local theater group, were intellectual and civic "leaders" in Haight-Ashbury. They would organize concerts and plays around the "Hashbury" (a term given to Haight-Ashbury suggesting the prevalence of drugs in the district) but more importantly set up free services to cater to the hippies.
They opened several "free stores" and provided free meals in Golden Gate Park.
The hippies' rejection of traditional values can also be seen in their living arrangements. Rather than a conventional households that comprised a mother, father and children, hippies would often times have 15 people living in an apartment, or 50 people occupying a house. Oftentimes there would not be set arrangements regarding who was living in the house. "Crashing" at other people's places was a common practice for the hippy, especially for the many who had no set residence.
As the hippies rejected society, they typically had no job. Food was no problem for them as it was quite easy to get free food in San Francisco in 1967. Rent, however, was a problem. While some hippies solved this problem by simply not paying rent, others became quite proficient at begging, and others actually got jobs, paying for rent for not only themselves but also their hippy brethren. The post office was one common place for hippies to find employment, because "jobs like sorting mail don't require much thought or effort," wrote Hunter S. Thompson while covering the Hashbury in May of 1967.
There was also a Temp Agency called the "Hip-Job Co-op" run by hippies to aid fellow hippies in their search for employment, according to the article "The Hippies Have it Made," which appeared in The New York Times on May 5, 1967.
As the Summer of Love gathered momentum the hippies gathered more and more animosity from the black residents of the Haight. Many saw the hippies as a nuisance that was ruining their neighborhood. They charged law enforcement with enforcing a double standard, saying that blacks would never have been allowed to do what the hippies were doing.
The hippies, even more so toward the end of the summer than the beginning, were not too fond of the blacks, either. "They are coming into the neighborhood to get white girls," one hippy told Earl Shorris of The New York Times.
Soon disappointment, boredom, lowering temperature, and the start of the new school year led to the hippies leaving the city.
On Oct. 6, The Diggers held a “death of the hippie†parade during which they burned a casket that contained symbols of the hippie movement such as clothes, beads, and marijuana.
The Summer of Love was over. Cyberhemia
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