Barry
07-09-2017, 07:00 AM
Here's a good article from the PD with memories of the Summer of Love from locals, including Alexandra Jacopetti Hart (who some of us know).
Barry
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Sonoma County residents share their personal stories from the Summer of Love
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT | July 7, 2017
Did we really change the world?
By Alexandra Jacopetti Hart
40824Did the ’60s-’70s counterculture change the world? If so, how? I’m finding the influences are broader than anyone could have been imagined in what the world saw as the flowering of the Bay Area counterculture, the year the runaways became flower children, the now-named Summer of Love.
But it had been brewing. James Baldwin wrote that 1960 was the “Break-out of Freedom” moment. He was tracking Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement, which was intricately intertwined with the anti-Vietnam War actions, and the peace movement (make love not war), and the beginnings of the counterculture as I experienced it. Another thread was the Beat Generation, out of which the hippies slowly emerged. Slow, that is, until it all started oozing out from behind the closed doors of small enclaves of people who previously didn’t know each other existed. The marker for that was the Trips Festival in San Francisco in January of 1966. I was there; I helped create it.
Earlier, gatherings to demonstrate against the war, peace groups, people going to the south to join MLK and the Civil Rights activities and some of them being murdered were all public, but which of these can signal the beginning? Why not go with just saying the Sixties?
At this time, the public word was that marijuana was dangerous, illegal, and would lead to stronger stuff. But no, it turned out we were being lied to. Having just come out of the constricting, boring 1950s, and having had parents who taught me about “straight and crooked thinking,” I recognized the crooked thinking that lying reveals. What else were the establishment folks concealing, even from themselves? I asked myself. That sentiment later expressed itself as “Don’t trust anyone over 30” — one of our youthful errors.
And then there was LSD. My first encounter with it was late in 1962 or ’63. The veils really dropped on any question taken into an LSD journey, if one was careful of “set and setting” as Alpert and Leary suggested. I found it very simple to cull the mainstream cultural download from what I believed in my core being. And that was revolutionary.
Later on, maybe a decade later, I found that the usefulness of LSD had paled, mainly because my primary questions about existence had been satisfactorily answered. I never used it for purposes other than inner discovery, and with a sense of the sacred. The shadow side of the psychedelic drug discoveries was, of course, the proliferation of other drugs that provided an escape and diminution of pain rather than illumination, resulting in the worldwide problem with addictive opiates and related substances.
Continues here (https://www.pressdemocrat.com/lifestyle/7174170-181/sonoma-county-residents-share-their?ref=TSM&artslide=0)
Barry
<style type="text/css">p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Lucida Grande'}</style>https://www.waccobb.net/forums/waccobb/keep90days/2015-10-04_15-56-29.png
Sonoma County residents share their personal stories from the Summer of Love
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT | July 7, 2017
Did we really change the world?
By Alexandra Jacopetti Hart
40824Did the ’60s-’70s counterculture change the world? If so, how? I’m finding the influences are broader than anyone could have been imagined in what the world saw as the flowering of the Bay Area counterculture, the year the runaways became flower children, the now-named Summer of Love.
But it had been brewing. James Baldwin wrote that 1960 was the “Break-out of Freedom” moment. He was tracking Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement, which was intricately intertwined with the anti-Vietnam War actions, and the peace movement (make love not war), and the beginnings of the counterculture as I experienced it. Another thread was the Beat Generation, out of which the hippies slowly emerged. Slow, that is, until it all started oozing out from behind the closed doors of small enclaves of people who previously didn’t know each other existed. The marker for that was the Trips Festival in San Francisco in January of 1966. I was there; I helped create it.
Earlier, gatherings to demonstrate against the war, peace groups, people going to the south to join MLK and the Civil Rights activities and some of them being murdered were all public, but which of these can signal the beginning? Why not go with just saying the Sixties?
At this time, the public word was that marijuana was dangerous, illegal, and would lead to stronger stuff. But no, it turned out we were being lied to. Having just come out of the constricting, boring 1950s, and having had parents who taught me about “straight and crooked thinking,” I recognized the crooked thinking that lying reveals. What else were the establishment folks concealing, even from themselves? I asked myself. That sentiment later expressed itself as “Don’t trust anyone over 30” — one of our youthful errors.
And then there was LSD. My first encounter with it was late in 1962 or ’63. The veils really dropped on any question taken into an LSD journey, if one was careful of “set and setting” as Alpert and Leary suggested. I found it very simple to cull the mainstream cultural download from what I believed in my core being. And that was revolutionary.
Later on, maybe a decade later, I found that the usefulness of LSD had paled, mainly because my primary questions about existence had been satisfactorily answered. I never used it for purposes other than inner discovery, and with a sense of the sacred. The shadow side of the psychedelic drug discoveries was, of course, the proliferation of other drugs that provided an escape and diminution of pain rather than illumination, resulting in the worldwide problem with addictive opiates and related substances.
Continues here (https://www.pressdemocrat.com/lifestyle/7174170-181/sonoma-county-residents-share-their?ref=TSM&artslide=0)