Confessions of a former flower-child: The Summer of Love

In 1967 I was 19 going on 20 and still living in South Africa and still involved in the anti-apartheid movement. But two things happened that year that made me realize that something was not quite right. The first was being arrested by the Secret Service, accused of being a communist and jailed. The cops had to let me go eventually because they could not prove that I was a member of the banned Communist Party. I'd known for a while that many of the people whom I knew in the anti-apartheid movement were communists and had tolerated them eventhough I detested communism but, after my run-in with the Secret Service cops, I began to see the communists in a different light.

I began to think that maybe I was mixed up with the wrong crowd. Till then I had seen them as dedicated revolutionaries filled with righteous anger at injustice but now I began to see their anger as hatred and resentment. It was not creative. It was destructive. They were miserable people who had nothing to give. They were motivated not by brotherly love but by misanthropy. They did not really want to help the down-trodden. They wanted to manipulate them. And I did not want to end up spending years in prison for people that I did not respect.

There were several different cliques inside the anti-apartheid movement. One of these cliques was made up of the artistic types. The serious communists called them Bohemians or Beatniks and constantly nagged them to stop smoking pot, boozing and partying. "You can party after the revolution," the commies told the Beatniks. I drifted towards this clique and was soon taking drugs and partying heavily.

The Beatniks talked a lot about what was happening in San Francisco. In January of 1967 there had been a "Human Be-In" in Golden Gate Park. In May the song "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)" was released sometime around my twentieth birthday. There was news from San Francisco that 200,000 hippies would gather in Golden Gate Park that July for a "Love-in." All this intrigued me. A revolution based on joy and love sounded much better than a communist revolution.

One of the Beatniks was a man who had been a trapeze artist in a circus. He came from a long line of circus performers. His parents had trained him and he had been very successful until he had fallen from a trapeze and been too badly injured to ever perform again. He got a big insurance settlement and moved into the really fancy penthouse on the 30th floor of a luxury beach-front hotel where he held a non-stop party and dished out drugs like candy. His guests were an odd mix of actors, artists and academics (who were "slumming") and beach-bums and surfer-boys (who satisfied his sexual appetites in return for free drugs.)

One night in June he announced that he had obtained a copy of the Beatles' new album, "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band." I was very high on a cocktail of drugs and, as soon as the music began to play, I went on a psychedelic "trip." It's almost impossible to describe a "trip." All I can say is that I was overwhelmed with beauty and filled with an ecstasy I had never experienced before. As I lay on the floor "watching" the Beatles music manifest itself in weird and wonderful cartoons, I began to laugh. I finally "knew" the answer to everything.

The next day, I knew that I had to leave South Africa, get away from the dour and humorless communists and join the real revolution of love and joy. I could see clearly that, if I stayed I would end up in prison and suffer for a cause for which I had no sympathy. I decided to move to the UK where I had a friend - a Scotsman who had lived in South Africa for a while. Of course I really wanted to go to San Francisco but I had no connections there and anyway I heard that the hippy revolution had started in Britain also and there was going to be a "Love-in" in Hyde Park in London.

I spent the next few years in the UK being a hippy, living in communes, taking lots of drugs - mostly LSD - and experimenting with many varieties of sex. It was fun at first but I eventually realized that the party was over. The hippy scene had deteriorated into a horrible nightmare. Heroin had become the drug of choice. The love and joy had disappeared. LSD started giving me bad "trips" and I wondered if I was going insane. I watched my friends become addicted to heroine which they used to treat their depression and dull their mental pain. Fortunately I did not like heroine and turned to God for help - but that's a whole nother story.

Here are some other peoples' takes on the Summer of Love.

The truth about the Summer of Love by Daniel Finkelstein:

Why do we call it the Summer of Love?

On April 5, 1967, in a converted firehouse on Waller Street, San Francisco, a press conference was held, called by assorted members of the hippy scene in the bohemian district of Haight-Ashbury. And they announced their intention to form a Council for a Summer of Love. The title stuck.

The origin of the name is significant. For this summer we are celebrating, if that’s the right word, the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love. And the tendency to see this term as the description of an era, rather than of a discreet series of events in a small district in one city, is strong. Does this mistake matter? Yes, because it is a symbol of something bigger – the way in which both Left and Right overestimate the Sixties counterculture. The 40th anniversary, while everybody is printing their cut-out-and-keep guide to the Sgt. Pepper’s album cover, is as good a moment as any to challenge this.

[...]

Haight’s Summer of Love wasn’t even cool. Here’s the verdict of George Harrison, who visited in early August: “You know, I went to Haight-Ashbury expecting it to be this brilliant place, and it was just full of horrible, spotty, dropout kids on drugs.” Far from making him, in Timothy Leary’s phrase, want to “turn on, tune in, drop out”, Harrison vowed to stop using LSD.

Free love: Was there a price to pay? by Brian Alexander

The sexual repercussions of the Summer of Love still reverberate today.

The lingering image of the Summer of Love has been one of bare-breasted flower children making love in patchouli-scented crash pads, sharing their food, their money and their partners.

The real story is more complex.

Many problems have been glossed over in the psychedelic, Jefferson Airplane, “make love, not war” sheen the era has received, not least of which was the soaring rate of sexually transmitted diseases. There was a price for all that free love. From 1964 through 1968, the rates of syphilis and gonorrhea in California rose 165 percent, according to published reports.

“There was a lot of drug use, group sex, communal sex,” says Dr. David Smith, who founded the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic with $500 of his own money. “It would be an understatement to say there was a spike in STDs. That’s like saying a hurricane is a strong wind.”

Clinic doctors would regularly visit local communes to track sexual partners of infected people.

“Well, Bill had sex with John, and John had sex with Cindy,” explains Smith. “So we often said, ‘Well, let’s just bring in a gallon of penicillin and inject everybody.’”

Smith sums up his feelings about how the scene degenerated from carefree experimentation into a disease-ridden mess: “We went from idealism to despair.”

[...]

Abortion was another issue that erupted during Summer of Love. By the end of the summer, many women, some of them young teenagers, needed treatment for botched abortions. Though then-governor Ronald Reagan signed a liberalized abortion law in June of 1967, trips to Tijuana, Mexico, for back-alley procedures were common. Smith’s clinic even treated Big Brother and the Holding Company singer Janis Joplin for a mishandled Mexican abortion. She became a benefactor of the clinic.

Such experiences with abortions gone bad helped lead some states to further liberalize their abortion laws until 1973 when the U.S. Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade, a ruling that still divides Americans.

The Summer of Drugs by Ted Nugent:

Forty years ago hordes of stoned, dirty, stinky hippies converged on San Francisco to "turn on, tune in, and drop out," which was the calling card of LSD proponent Timothy Leary. Turned off by the work ethic and productive American Dream values of their parents, hippies instead opted for a cowardly, irresponsible lifestyle of random sex, life-destroying drugs and mostly soulless rock music that flourished in San Francisco.

The Summer of Drugs climaxed with the Monterey Pop Festival which included some truly virtuoso musical talents such as Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, both of whom would be dead a couple of years later due to drug abuse. Other musical geniuses such as Jim Morrison and Mama Cass would also be dead due to drugs within a few short years. The bodies of chemical-infested, brain-dead liberal deniers continue to stack up like cordwood.

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The 1960s, a generation that wanted to hold hands, give peace a chance, smoke dope and change the world, changed it all right: for the worse. America is still suffering the horrible consequences of hippies who thought utopia could be found in joints and intentional disconnect.

A quick study of social statistics before and after the 1960s is quite telling. The rising rates of divorce, high school drop outs, drug use, abortion, sexual diseases and crime, not to mention the exponential expansion of government and taxes, is dramatic. The "if it feels good, do it" lifestyle born of the 1960s has proved to be destructive and deadly.

So now, 40 years later, there are actually people who want to celebrate the anniversary of the Summer of Drugs. Hippies are once again descending on ultra-liberal San Francisco--a city that once wanted to give shopping carts to the homeless--to celebrate and try to remember their dopey days of youth when so many of their musical heroes and friends long ago assumed room temperature by "partying" themselves to death. Nice.

And millions of people of my generation are permanently trapped in their pie-in-the-sky Marxist/John Lennonism and cannot see that their wishful thinking is no substitute for serious thought and responsible behavior. The worst legacy of the Summer of Love is that many of these people went on to become teachers and introduced their deluded fantasies to our children.