50th Anniversary of the Summer of Love

Yes, I know that this is actually an image of Woodstock, which took place in 1969, and not in the "Summer of Love" in 1967. However, it still carried the best of the spirit of the summer of '67, being a peaceful assembly of nearly half a million people, and the brilliance and creativity of those two days, both on the stage and off of it, has lived on and grown legendary, even almost to mythic levels. Plus, the whole anti-war and anti-establishment spirit, mixed with the music and artistry, as well as the drugs, all were present throughout both the summer of '67 (the summer of love) and Woodstock, and of course the years in between. So, yes, it seemed fitting to the spirit of that age to use this image as an illustration of the prevailing spirit of that age.

I was watching Decades for August 25th on the Decades channel recently, and they had something on this being the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love, which was the summer of 1967.

That was the year when hippies peacefully invaded television screens and popular culture, and brought the message of "peace, love, and understanding" to the mainstream. They added a splash of color to what had largely been a black and white world, almost quite literally, to my understanding.

A lot of people take the hippies as a joke, and imitate the overly relaxed style that they are supposed to represent. But the counterculture youth movement of the 1960's nevertheless managed to wake up many strands of thought that the nation as a whole rarely ever thought about at the time. Remember, it was a strong response to the conformist and largely colorless, black and white way of life that had existed before. The 1950's were a time of serious bordering on irrational fears regarding communism, and when racist laws were not only officially on the books, but were strongly enforced by both the law and social norms, as well. These were some of the aspects of the darker underbelly of the United States that many people who have nostalgia for this period tend to conveniently overlook.

The United States was already a changing place, and the 1960's already a turbulent time, by the time that the Summer of Love added the hippie counterculture movement into the mix. After all, the world had witnessed the horrors of the Kennedy assassination, and then the violent reactions to nonviolent protests during the civil rights movement. And, of course, there was the Vietnam War, which was likely fought under false pretenses under the umbrella that a tiny nation had attacked the military of the world's greatest superpower at the time.

So, perhaps a reaction to all of this was not only needed, but was indeed seriously overdue.

I know a lot of people dismiss that generation for turning their backs on that counterculture movement, and the hopes that many of them had to produce a better world with greater peace, love, and understanding. And I also will not deny that surely some people who were into the music and experimentation with drugs, and maybe who protested against the Vietnam War for self-serving reasons, wound up turning their backs on those values and grew up to become yuppies who voted for Reagan and two Bushes and, perhaps later on, Trump.

However, most of the people who truly believed in the counterculture hopes and aspirations back then were probably legitimately wanting to create a better world, and to my understanding, most of them held true. Most of them still feel that maybe there was something to it, that an opportunity had come and, unfortunately, gone, with the door slamming shut. Many of them, including my own parents, were alarmed to see the country take a strong turn in exactly the opposite direction, and to come to mock those very values that the hippies stood for.

Indeed, I still maintain that there probably was a glimpse to some other truths than what the country had known prior to that whole era, and to the counterculture movement, which the hippies were a part of. If the sixties were anything, they were a time when there was constantly increased illumination of the imperfections of American society as it existed then, and of extreme analysis and criticism of all of these imperfections. It was bound to get people upset, and some narrow-minded people who took criticism of these things as hatred for the country. However, change never comes easily or painlessly, and I for one am thankful for the counterculture of the 1960's. No, I was not yet around, and by the time that I was born, let alone had even an inkling of what the 1960's were and meant to the country and to many people still, that era was long, long gone.

Still, there were some positives. Many positives, in fact - more probably than most people are willing to admit. Ultimately, the unpopularity of that war, and the strong reactions to it, as well as the demonizing of what had been racist norms, sprung from there.

Not everything was good, of course. They went too far with the drugs, surely. Also, as stated before, likely many anti-war people held that position because it was self-serving, because they personally did not want to go off and possibly die in a faraway land. Indeed, some of those people perhaps became the chickenhawks who came to support militarism under George W. Bush and now Donald Trump (and let us not forget that those two men in particular, who seem so willing to send young soldiers off to foreign lands to fight and die for their country - themselves went to extraordinary lengths to avoid serving and fighting in the Vietnam War when it was their time to go and fight). And frankly, while I think skepticism of government and institutions was a welcome change for the 1960's, it has gone too far these days, with far too many people condemning anything that has to do with government, to the point of allowing other institutions, like corporations, to essentially set the pace, with their own narrow and obviously self-serving agenda, which has served to quickly deteriorate the standard of living in the United States. Many people now embrace the craziest conspiracy theories, and a lot of this can be traced back to that early skepticism of the 1960's.

But you cannot throw the baby out with the bathwater. Again, there had to be a reaction to the  overly conformist days of the 1950's and early 1960's, as surely as there will be a response to the present extremism and narcissism of this era of Trump. And there were a lot fo good things, even wonderful things, that came out of that era, which the hippies, the people who brought the country the Summer of Love, helped to create.

The level of creativity in art - perhaps especially music - has indeed had a lasting effect. Maybe rock 'n roll had somewhat of a rebellious nature before, with Chuck Berry skipping on one leg while playing the guitar, or Elvis swinging his pelvis, and which shocked parents before. But it was in the sixties that many artists - and again, especially musicians - started to have focus. They started experimenting with different intellectual, philosophical, spiritual, and ideological approaches, and they also started to get more focused on politics, on what they felt was demonstrably wrong in American society. The Beatles seemed at first to be a largely benign threat, but in time, their experimentation and activism grew sharper. This was helped along by Bob Dylan, who was the ultimate example of an activist musician shocking people by taking a stand and incorporating powerful, thought-provoking lyrics meant to challenge people. In time, the music itself would sound radically different, and really, all of this happened with amazing speed, when you think about it.

I think that there was more of some things because of the activism that emerged in the 1960's that have served American society well, and which spread to other countries, as well. That includes more colorful clothes and good, experimental music. That also includes less tolerance for intolerance, which we see still as very relevant in this day and age, when Nazis marching in the streets and giving fascist, straight arm salutes are almost universally condemned, even in the traditional Deep South, where sympathizers of white supremacy certainly used to hold sway. And again, there is more skepticism of the lines that institutions try to feed people. More and more, we can recognize the patterns of this forced, processed thought that serves narrow purposes.

On many levels, San Francisco, and perhaps to a lesser extent, New York City and other cities, were greatly impacted by that era, and have never been the same since. I have been to San Francisco, and it still has a lot of artists who seem to sometimes be throwbacks to that earlier period. Indeed, San Francisco in particularly seems to symbolize a modern city where those kinds of values are often championed far more than they are elsewhere in the country.

The Summer of Love woke many Americans to the presence of something radically different, something new that had not been seen before. And it did not end merely with the passing of that summer. As I mentioned before, and in earlier posts over the years, the best example of this counterculture of the hippies would come actually two summers later, with Woodstock. The brilliance of the creativity there, as well as the nonviolent approach - and let me remind everyone that there were no reports of violence during that whole weekend, despite the tight circumstances of nearly half a million people being squeezed together in an incredibly small space - continues to speak well for that era, for the hippies, and what they represented and believed in.