In my youth that meant “hippie”. I wasn’t one…I thought of myself as an existentialist…but some of these cats were hot!
WARNING
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It was a time of war and a time of peace advocacy; it was painted VW buses and The Beatles…it was hippie communes and sit ins…protests everywhere and “turn on and disconnect”…The reality of the day was sometimes too much to bear and hippies got high.
But the whole movement, now gone; did bring a new consciousness to America. It made a lot of people realize that we were engaged in unnecessary wars; a lot of people questioned the “Good Old Fashioned American Values” as superficial and banal. This was also a step closer to accepting diversity. A lot of the older parents saw their children become hippies and most had no choice but to accept them the way they were.
There were great strides made in the Civil Rights movement when the American Black finally got some partial participation in society and the recognition that they had long been denied their basic rights.
“Leave it to Beaver” was ending…that picture of “My Three Sons” and those idyllic home spun middle class white America was all a farce; it was wonderful for WASPs but some of us in minorities didn’t fare all that well.
Although I was right there in the middle of it; I didn’t realize the significance of what was occurring. The Summer of Love was a social-cultural phenomenon that occurred during summer of 1967, when as many as 100,000 people converged on the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco, creating a cultural and political rebellion. While their counterparts also gathered in other cities across the U.S. and even Europe.
It was a combination of many things: FREE LOVE, the shedding of prudish inhibition; sexual freedom , the music and the use of psychedelic drugs and the most overt manifestation of creative expression. And I lived there during those years…not in Haight-Ashbury but in the Mission District.
The Summer of Love became a landmark moment of the 1960s, as the hippie movement came into public awareness and gained notoriety…most straight laced, uptight Americans were scandalized. This unprecedented gathering of young people is often considered to have been a social experiment, because of alternative lifestyles that became common, both during the summer itself and during subsequent years. These lifestyles were often in the form of communal living where unrelated people came to live together and “crash” at somebody’s pad; while they pooled their meager resources to feed each other…this in itself was remarkable because Americans had always been suspicious of strangers and would not think of sharing a meal with one let alone living quarters and of course the ultimate insult: sharing your bed!
Free and communal sex and then came Woodstock. Speed forward to present day and you find that flowers are not just for funerals…they are also used as an offering, an expression of love. When a man brings you flowers you surely think it is romantic; or your boyfriend who works at Home Depot has a birthday and you send him flowers…can you imagine the expression on the faces of his co-workers?
Some men like flowers so much that they just don’t only grow them but will have them as decorations, tattooed on their bodies…now, that’s hot.
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