2017 marks The 50th anniversary of The Summer of Love in San Francisco and the City and people of San Francisco have announced many events. They sound wonderful and if you missed the original Summer of Love, perhaps you can catch some of the spirits this year, by visiting San Francisco.
I am from San Francisco, where there in college, I started to write letters to the editors of newspapers around the San Francisco Bay Area. Most of them were published and there is where I learned, I love to write.
Sometimes coincidence occurs and raises curiosity & questions, such as how strange. I recently decided I needed a change in life, from being a writer & activist, or at least a break & stop what I was doing. A great deal of love of what I was doing was lost, from all the negativity and destruction I saw and experienced.
I recently decided I needed a change in life, from being a writer on serious global issues & activist on them because a great deal of love of what I was doing was lost, from all the negativity and destruction I saw and experienced.
And so I took a vacation and how strange? Here comes “Summer of Love” 50 year anniversary. And so, if there ever was a time to visit San Francisco, this is the summer to do so.
The Summer of Love was a social phenomenon that occurred during the summer of 1967, when as many as 100,000 people, mostly young people sporting hippie fashions of dress and behavior, converged in San Francisco‘s neighborhood Haight-Ashbury. Although hippies also gathered in many other places in the U.S., Canada, and Europe, San Francisco was at that time the most publicized location for hippie lifestyle.
I am quite old now and lived in San Francisco from early teens to young adult to an adult working, but also visited San Francisco as a boy with my family. So early in life, I experienced some strong ruminants of the Summer of Love, especially from my white American uncle.
My uncle graduated from a prestigious law school top of his class and came to San Francisco to live and work. During the 1960s, he became like much of the people of San Francisco, being much a hippie. My uncle was different, in that as a lawyer, he was better off financially than most hippies. However, his personal lifestyle was all about being a hippie, from psychedelic apartment to the way he dresses & social life.
From then to now, how is the spirit of the Summer of Love doing?
UK’s press, the Guardian, reported that there have been many changes to the Haight Ashbury area over the years, and now there is the problem of crime. At the end of this blog post, there are some Guardian reports, one headline for it: “San Francisco’s hippy heartland struggles to hold on to the spirit of peace and love.”
For those who are about 60 or older, are most likely familiar with what a hippie is. However, if you are not familiar with Hippies, the following is from Wikipedia.
Wikipedia:
Hippies, sometimes called flower children, were an eclectic group. Many were suspicious of the government, rejected consumerist values, and generally opposed the Vietnam War. A few were interested in politics; others were concerned more with art (music, painting, poetry in particular) or religious and meditative practices.
A hippie (or hippy) is a member of a liberal counterculture, originally a youth movement that started in the United States and the United Kingdom during the mid-1960s and spread to other countries around the world. The word hippie came from hipster and was initially used to describe beatniks who had moved into New York City’s Greenwich Village and San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district. The term hippie was first popularized in San Francisco by Herb Caen, who was a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle.
The origins of the terms hip and hep are uncertain. By the 1940s, both had become part of African American jive slang and meant “sophisticated; currently fashionable; fully up-to-date”.[1][2][3] The Beats adopted the term hip, and early hippies inherited the language and countercultural values of the Beat Generation. Hippies created their own communities, listened to psychedelic music, embraced the sexual revolution, and used drugs such as marijuana, LSD, peyote and psilocybin mushrooms to explore altered states of consciousness.
In January 1967, the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco popularized hippie culture, leading to the Summer of Love on the West Coast of the United States, and the 1969 Woodstock Festival on the East Coast. Hippies in Mexico, known as jipitecas, formed La Onda and gathered at Avándaro, while in New Zealand, nomadic housetruckers practiced alternative lifestyles and promoted sustainable energy at Nambassa. In the United Kingdom in 1970, many gathered at the gigantic Isle of Wight Festival with a crowd of around 400,000 people. In later years, mobile “peace convoys” of New Age travelers made summer pilgrimages to free music festivals at Stonehenge and elsewhere. In Australia, hippies gathered at Nimbin for the 1973 Aquarius Festival and the annual Cannabis Law Reform Rally or MardiGrass. “Piedra Roja Festival“, a major hippie event in Chile, was held in 1970.
Hippie fashion and values had a major effect on culture, influencing popular music, television, film, literature, and the arts. Since the 1960s, many aspects of hippie culture have been assimilated by mainstream society. The religious and cultural diversity espoused by the hippies has gained widespread acceptance, and Eastern philosophy and spiritual concepts have reached a larger audience.
A July 1968 Time Magazine study on hippie philosophy credited the foundation of the hippie movement with historical precedent as far back as the Sadhu of India, the spiritual seekers who had renounced the world by taking “Sannyas”. Even the counterculture of the Ancient Greeks, espoused by philosophers like Diogenes of Sinope and the Cynics were also early forms of hippie culture. It also named as notable influences the religious and spiritual teachings of Henry David Thoreau, Hillel the Elder, Jesus, Buddha, St. Francis of Assisi, Gandhi, and J.R.R. Tolkien.
The first signs of modern “proto-hippies” emerged in fin de siècle Europe. Between 1896 and 1908, a German youth movement arose as a countercultural reaction to the organized social and cultural clubs that centered around German folk music. Known as Der Wandervogel (“wandering bird”), the hippie movement opposed the formality of traditional German clubs, instead emphasizing amateur music and singing, creative dress, and communal outings involving hiking and camping. Inspired by the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Goethe, Hermann Hesse, and Eduard Baltzer, Wandervogel attracted thousands of young Germans who rejected the rapid trend toward urbanization and yearned for the pagan, back-to-nature spiritual life of their ancestors. During the first several decades of the 20th century, Germans settled around the United States, bringing the values of the Wandervogel with them. Some opened the first health food stores, and many moved to southern California where they could practice an alternative lifestyle in a warm climate. Over time, young Americans adopted the beliefs and practices of the new immigrants. One group, called the “Nature Boys”, took to the California desert and raised organic food, espousing a back-to-nature lifestyle like the Wandervogel.Songwriter eden ahbez wrote a hit song called Nature Boy inspired by Robert Bootzin (Gypsy Boots), who helped popularize health-consciousness, yoga, and organic food in the United States.
Like Wandervogel, the hippie movement in the United States began as a youth movement. Composed mostly of white teenagers and young adults between 15 and 25 years old, hippies inherited a tradition of cultural dissent from bohemians and beatniks of the Beat Generation in the late 1950s. Beats like Allen Ginsberg crossed over from the beat movement and became fixtures of the burgeoning hippie and anti-war movements. By 1965, hippies had become an established social group in the U.S., and the movement eventually expanded to other countries, extending as far as the United Kingdom and Europe, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, Mexico, and Brazil. The hippie ethos influenced The Beatles and others in the United Kingdom and other parts of Europe, and they in turn influenced their American counterparts. Hippie culture spread worldwide through a fusion of rock music, folk, blues, and psychedelic rock; it also found expression in literature, the dramatic arts, fashion, and the visual arts, including film, posters advertising rock concerts, and album covers. In 1968, self-described hippies represented just under 0.2% of the U.S. population and dwindled away by mid-1970s.
Along with the New Left and the Civil Rights Movement, the hippie movement was one of three dissenting groups of the 1960s counterculture. Hippies rejected established institutions, criticized middle-class values, opposed nuclear weapons and the Vietnam War, embraced aspects of Eastern philosophy, championed sexual liberation, were often vegetarian and eco-friendly, promoted the use of psychedelic drugs which they believed expanded one’s consciousness, and created intentional communities or communes. They used alternative arts, street theater, folk music, and psychedelic rock as a part of their lifestyle and as a way of expressing their feelings, their protests and their vision of the world and life. Hippies opposed political and social orthodoxy, choosing a gentle and nondoctrinaire ideology that favored peace, love and personal freedom, expressed for example in The Beatles‘ song “All You Need is Love“. Hippies perceived the dominant culture as a corrupt, monolithic entity that exercised undue power over their lives, calling this culture “The Establishment“, “Big Brother“, or “The Man“. Noting that they were “seekers of meaning and value”, scholars like Timothy Miller have described hippies as a new religious movement.
From the Guardian:
50 years after summer of love, yuppies have replaced San Francisco’s hippies
Nostalgia runs high as the city approached 50th anniversary, but residents say free love has given way to wealth and individualism
Isaiah Wolfe, who goes by the name Orange, spends his nights under a bush outside Golden Gate park and his days on the corner of Haight and Ashbury streets, soaking up the love. Love from his wife, his dogs, his buddies and everyone else who calls this part of San Francisco home.
“We’ve come here to experience the love this place has,” said Orange, 20, sporting a beard, piercings and multi-coloured sweater. “I heard the summer of love was the best thing to ever happen.”
It happened in 1967 but Orange, a Minnesotan who has criss-crossed the United States sleeping rough for three years, could feel the glow 50 years later. “People here treat you as an actual human being unlike anywhere else in the country.”
Sunshine Powers, an artist with a passion for glitter, also sensed the ethos of that summer, when 100,000 hippies turned this neighbourhood into a counter-culture citadel. “We’re bringing back the colour, the creativity, the consciousness. What happened here 50 years ago transformed who we are as a society.” (read more)
From the Guardian:
San Francisco, 50 years on from the Summer of Love
The scent of marijuana still lingers in the air, but what about rebellion? Half a century on from the year the world was told to turn on, tune in and drop out, we revisit the birthplace of 60s counterculture
California’s signature scent of marijuana permeates the warm air in San Francisco’s Buena Vista Park. Dogs pant and people strip off. The arrival of an early summer has caught the Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood off guard. It is a distinctive, blissed-out atmosphere but still an age away from the drug-fuelled, music-drenched summer of 1967, when 100,000 people converged on the Haight.
Back then, people came to embrace a higher consciousness and obey the “Turn on, tune in, drop out” message that Timothy Leary had delivered earlier that year to 30,000 people in Golden Gate Park at the “Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In”.” (read more)
From the Guardian:
Golden daze: 50 years on from the Summer of Love
It’s the 50th anniversary of San Francisco’s Summer of Love. Here five people who were at the heart of the counter-culture movement tell Aaron Millar how flowers, LSD, music and radical ideas changed youth consciousness forever
Fifty years ago this summer there was talk of revolution. Protests against the Vietnam war were popping up all over the US, the civil rights movement had found its voice and a new vision of the world, fuelled by free love, psychedelics and rock ’n’ roll, was being embraced. It was in San Francisco, in a small neighbourhood called Haight Ashbury, where it found its perfect form.
The Haight, named after the intersection of Haight and Ashbury streets in north central San Francisco, became the home of alternative living in America. Born out of the Beat Generation of the 50s, with its writers like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg who railed against the conventionality and materialism of their time, a new generation of bohemians – no more than a few hundred artists, activists and musicians including the Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin – began congregating in this small enclave of the Bay area. They put on parties and experimented, with communal living, psychological transcendence and a rejection of material values. It was, for a while, a kind of utopia, the antithesis of the war they were protesting against and the inequality they saw in the deep south. The Beatles were on the airwaves, Jimi was playing guitar, the world was on the cusp of radical change: it was a good time to be young. (read more)
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