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The Summer of Love Reconsidered
“America is still suffering the horrible consequences of hippies who thought utopia could be found in joints and intentional disconnect.” — Ted Nugent
It has been 40 years since the Summer of Love and those unlovable right-wingnut Republicans, led by their knuckle-dragging shoot ‘em up poster boy, are waging class welfare anew against a favorite target. But is it possible that Ted Nugent has a point?
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13 Responses to “The Summer of Love Reconsidered”
I’m not a child of the sixties, but I am the offspring of one American hippie and one Spanish hippie, having been born into the hippie community center of Spain (Ibiza) and passed much of my childhood in the hippie center of the US (San Francisco). I’ve met loads of ex-hippies, the friends of my parents, and even some who managed to remain fairly connected with the hippie subculture (at least in Ibiza). Generally speaking they’ve come out fairly standard, though almost all remain liberal. My father was a computer consultant and my mother a housewife. My parents never hid their past from me, and I think their frankness about sexual and drug issues has actually made me less risky.
My parents friends run the gamut from schoolteachers, doctors, bar owners, housewives and a whole rainbow of computer techies. The one friend of my mother who remained mostly a hippie had several children who as I recall are now an archaeologist, one teacher, one teacher-in-training, one farmer, and one still in school. I am a scientist. My cousins, who grew up in a totally conventional non-hippie atmosphere, have not come out particularly on top.
It was a dream, a beautiful dream, that you could change the world with music and love. Some things did change, especially in the sexual hangups department. The social-justice atmosphere gave the blacks on the civil-rights movement much needed allies (beating and hosing down middle class suburban white kids wasn’t as kosher for the TV set). Some things changed, and many more stayed the same. I value the liberty that my parents generation achieved for those of us that came after, but it is neither Eden nor Hell, but a work in progress. I worry about my generation, much less idealistic, fed off the disillusion of our parents, convinced that we CAN’T change the world. That can’t be healthy either.
Beautifully said.
Lynx
Very beautiful. My wife and I have been married for over thirty years and in some ways we are typical of our generation (we turned 18 in 1968). We get together with four of my high school friends who each has had one marriage! that has lasted all these years, and yet 2 of the guys were at Woodstock and two came back from Viet Nam with pounds of marijuana. (I wish they were here to tell the story….)
Our daughter will be 24 and she writes often about how her generation does not hope. We did go wrong somewhere in America. Any human problem should be able to be solved by human resources and ingenuity.
I see two problems with the WSJ piece. First, Mr. Nugent is a flame-thrower. That is amusing if you agree with him, but hardly starts a conversation if what he is discussing is important. And second, The WSJ features him to squelch conversation. Their editorial pages have a consistent view: “Free Market”/Power/Money are good; dissent, non-conformity, “alternative lifestyles” are bad.
Why they pick Mr. Nugent is a variation of this argument: “some of my best friends are liberals, blacks, women, etc., and even they admit…” It is ironic, since I bet the editors would be more at home with my high school buddies and I and our wives than they would with Mr. Nugent, but that is what The Moderate Voice is trying to counter: this idea that we have to sound byte each other into a corner.
p.s. The Summer of Love in 1967 was the media created death rattle of a movement that had been going on for decades.
See Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums (1958) and Gary Snyder’s poetry, especially Earth House Hold.
http://www.beatmuseum.org/kerouac/jackkerouac.html
Why would anyone give any relevance to anything Ted Nugent says? He actually looks like a hippie himself and has in fact has certainly engaged in permiscious sex, with underage girls at that.
Ironic, because as the 60s showed with the rise of tie-dye t-shirts and Grateful Dead music – and the ’00s are showing today – with the internet subculture and its offspring, there’s a lot of money to be made in alternative lifestyles, non-conformity, and dissent.
Laura says:
And here I thought I was the only one to think this.
Counter cultures have dreams without workable plans. When they die, their dreams die with them.
The hippy dream of replacing stark materialism with social ideals has died, and the world is a much colder,place as a consequence.
The ‘hippy dream’ was pure Communism, and I am not saying that as a slander, just a statement of fact.
The true believers made a try of it on communes, after all. That didn’t work out, though, because as others have noted, perfect forms of sharing or government require perfect people, and they are in short supply.
That is why it was just a Utopian dream. Nothing wrong with those, but you cannot expect them to be any more real than fairy tales, after all.
AR – What about Israel’s state sponsored kibbutz? Those seemed to work fine untill the Israelis went Right and fell in love with the Likud.
What about them? They worked for a while, then they didn’t.
The exact causes really don’t matter in the end. All Utopian dreams die from the the grim facts of reality.
Harsh, but true.
Communism doesn’t work. Neither does pure free market capitalism. Extremes just tend to break down in the real world.
Jim – Very good point.
Successful systems – economic, political, whatever – need a combination of a workable core philosophy, and checks and balances against the inherent weakness of that particular system.