Quote:

In a 25-square-block area of San Francisco, in the summer of 1967, an ecstatic, Dionysian mini-world sprang up like a mushroom, dividing American culture into a Before and After unparalleled since World War II. If you were between 15 and 30 that year, it was almost impossible to resist the lure of that transcendent, peer-driven season of glamour, ecstasy, and Utopianism. It was billed as the Summer of Love, and its creators did not employ a single publicist or craft a media plan. Yet the phenomenon washed over America like a tidal wave, erasing the last dregs of the martini-sipping Mad Men era and ushering in a series of liberations and awakenings that irreversibly changed our way of life.

“It was this magical moment … this liberation movement, a time of sharing that was very special,” with “a lot of trust going around,” says Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia, who had a baby with Ken Kesey, the man who helped kick off that season, and who then married Jerry Garcia, the man who epitomized its fruition. “The Summer of Love became the template: the Arab Spring is related to the Summer of Love; Occupy Wall Street is related to the Summer of Love,” says Joe McDonald, the creator and lead singer of Country Joe and the Fish and a boyfriend of one of that summer’s two queens, Janis Joplin. “And it became the new status quo,” he continues. “The Aquarian Age! They all want sex. They all want to have fun. Everyone wants hope. We opened the door, and everybody went through it, and everything changed after that. Sir Edward Cook, the biographer of Florence Nightingale, said that when the success of an idea of past generations is ingrained in the public and taken for granted the source is forgotten.”

Well, here is that source, according to the people who lived it.

Suddenly That Summer (Vanity Fair)

(01-19-2023, 09:20 PM)ABNARTY Wrote: Please forgive me. I'm sure I'll get blasted for this. 

I have no clue why, but I really do not like they whole hippie thing. The flowers in the hair, the music, the attitude, bell bottom jeans, all of it. Don't get me wrong, I fully support yahoo's doing what their freedoms allow. If they all want to get in a VW bus, smoke dope, and drive to San Francisco, more power to them.  

I fully admit it was before my time. I was alive, but just a small child. My parents were not of the hippie-ilk as I think they were too old at the time. However, I do remember bits and pieces of it. 

My mania did not metastasize fully until later in life and has stayed with me ever since. It's just yuuuccckkk looking at it. I want to zap them all to another dimension. Send them to all Antarctica in their VW bus. Purge the airwaves of every hippy song ever written. Yup. I am a hater. I do not know why. 

What's weird is I know plenty of people from that time who were part of the whole scene. I do not hate them. They are OK folks. But if they brought out their old bell bottom jeans with the flower-power patches, I would scream to the heavens and burn them on sight. Respectfully of course. 

OK... flame away.