Peace, love and understanding

Last Saturday, thousands rallied at the “Peace, Love and Understanding” event in San Francisco’s Civic Center -- very much in the spirit of San Francisco’s Summer of Love 50 years ago!

“Still, here we are, 50 years later, marveling at the hippies, who came and went as mysteriously as the Druids, and wondering: What was that? They left behind a vague but definite cultural imprint, a kind of peculiar residue that shows up at places like yoga studios in strip malls or organic vegetable stands at the farmer’s market. That flash on the horizon that lit up the world from the ground zero of Haight-Ashbury a half-century back has never been fully extinguished. No matter how commercialized, corrupted, disintegrated, defiled or reviled the hippies have been, they refuse to disappear. Part of the reason was that Boomers have always remembered their youth. At the same time, the inaccurate mythology of the Summer of Love was such that younger generations have tried to replicate it.”—Joel Selvin, “Summer of Love: Paradise that never was lives on in legend,” San Francisco Chronicle (March 10, 2017) 

Progressive San Francisco launched the long-awaited Support @ Home (S@H), a new home care voucher program funded by San Francisco Department of Aging and Adult Services and administered by Institute on Aging (IOA).  IOA held an information meeting with Community Living Fund Director Laura Liesem and S@H Director Jeanne Caruso who explained the program guidelines. S@H is designed to serve San Francisco residents age 18+ who require assistance with at least two activities of daily living or instrumental activities of daily living, yet are not eligible for other subsidized home care such as Medi-Cal In-Home Supportive Services (IHSS), due to income/resource limits.  For those who demonstrate the program’s financial need requirements, S@H provides up to 15 hours of subsidized home care per week from contracted agencies, so residents can continue living safely in their homes.  During this two-year pilot program, S@H’s two-person staff intends to serve 250 clients.

To better understand those good ol’ days and legacy for today’s older Americans (post-World War II Baby Boom generation), I attended more events commemorating the 50^th anniversary of the Summer of Love.

Revisiting the Summer of Love

Northwestern University’s Center for Civic Engagement and The California Historical Society presented an academic conference, “Revisiting the Summer of Love, Rethinking Counterculture.” 

Northwestern University’s Michael J. Kramer presented the opening lecture, Hot Fun in the Summertime: Microcosmic and Macrocosmic Views of the Summer of Love. Summer of Love participants attempted to develop a social structure for living in the Now.   

Haight Ashbury Survival School: predecessor to Senior & Disability Action’s Senior Survival School?  

Moonalice Trio performed 1960s psychedelic rock music. 

Stanford University historian Fred Turner presented his lecture, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: The Dream of a World Beyond Politics, based on his award-winning book, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole EarthNetwork, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (2006) and The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties (2013).  He provided an overview of how the counterculture's values of back-to-the-land, small-scale technologies, peer collaboration and communication shaped the era's communes and today's social media.

According to Fred Turner, the counterculture was represented by the New Left and New Communalists: both movements were anti-bureaucracy, anti-big technology and anti-mass culture … the dream of a world beyond politics.  Buckminster Fuller's artist-scientists would remake the world through design, not politics.  Communes disabled discussion by "rule of cool," so most communes collapsed unless they were authoritarian or religious.

Stewart Brand's The Whole Earth Catalog (1968) introduced new tools for the New Communalists.

Rural Communes panel:

• Ramon Sender Barayon on Open Land Sixties Communes in Sonoma County talked about Morning Star and Wheeler Ranches, two hippie rural communes in western Sonoma
• Timothy Miller from University of Kansas on Revisiting the 60s Communes, noted hundreds of communes remain today outside the mainstream
• Benjamin Klein of CSU East Bay on A Mobile Hallucination: Celebrating the 4^th of July with the Hog Farm, shared photos of the great hippie migration between Taos and Santa Fe, taken by his uncle Irwin between 1967 and 1971.

In "Peace, Love, and Social Security: Baby Boomers Retire to the Commune," The Atlantic reporter Anna Spinner found former hippies and growing numbers of Baby Boomers choosing to retire in intentional communities that are multi-generational for support and care--different from the youthful experiment of communes.

Robyn Spencer of Lehman College on The Black Power Revolution and the Summer of Love.  She talked about the role of the Vietnam War protest and failed War on Poverty on the rise of the Black Panther Party. She also observed that the conference's predominantly white male audience was similar to Summer of Love participants.  

From Punishment to Protection: Human Service Innovation in the Summer of Love panel talked about the beginnings of their agencies as welcoming support of the thousands of young people who came to San Francisco during the Summer of Love:

• Hospitality House Executive Director Joe Wilson on Building Community in the Central City for homeless, mostly LGBT youth who arrived in the Tenderloin
• Huckleberry Youth Programs Executive Director Douglas Styles on Tension Between Experiment and Establishment: Sustained Innovation for teenage runaways
• Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic Founder David E. Smith on Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic: Health Care is a Right treated people addicted to drugs when it was a crime for physicians to treat addicts.

Identity and Transformation of the Self panel:

• Blake Slonecker of Heritage University on “It’s Not Unmanly”: Sexual Politics and Collective Work at the Eugene Augur, 1969-1974
• Sherry L. Smith of Southern Methodist University on Revisiting the Hippies and Native Americans
• Jeremy Varon of The New School on Identity, Performance, Solidarity: Self and Community in the 1960s Counterculture                     

Northwestern University’s Stephen F. Eisenman on William Blake and the Age of Aquarius 

Intellectual Origins of the Counterculture: How Theory Shaped Practice panel:

• James Block of DePaul University on New Individuals in New Communities: The Counterculture Vision of Post-Liberal America
• Michael J. Kramer of Northwestern University on “A Tiny Banner Against the Inhumanities of the Technocracy”: Unfurling Theodore Roszak’s Countercultural Social Criticism 

• Dan A. Lewis of Northwestern University on The Psyche and Polis in Social Theory: A Geography of Influence in the Bay Area 

David Farber of University of Kansas on From Innocence to Experience: LSD, the Counterculture and Sustainable Lives, described the many countercultural practices that have gone mainstream.  

The Media and the Summer of Love: From Street to Straight panel:

• Joel Selvin, author of The Summer of Love: The Inside Story of LSD, Rock & Roll, Free Love and High Time in the Wild West (1999)
• Rosie McGee, photographer and author of Dancing with the Dead (2013)
• Charles Perry, author of The Haight-Ashbury: A History Overground and Underground Press
• Abe Peck, author of Uncovering the Sixties: The Life and Times of the Underground Press (1985) 

Commemorative poster

Diggerly-Do’s 

In Diggerly-Do’s, Kent Minaut recalled the first six months of the Diggers: free food in the park, encounters with police, free store, meeting Black Panther Huey Newton, etc.

Chris Carlsson of Shaping SF facilitated Q & A after Kent’s performance. 

Appearing incognito in the audience was Digger Peter Coyote (at left in photo), author of Sleeping Where I Fall, his immensely readable memoir of the 1960s. 

Digger Judy Goldhaft at literature table

“The Hippie Revolution”

After screening of Jack O’Connell’s documentary, “The Hippie Revolution” (1968; a version updated in 1986 can be viewed online at Jack O’Connell’s website) at San Francisco Main Library, Ben Fong-Torres interviewed Louise “Today” Malone.  Now age 60 and a grandmother, Today calls herself “Yesterday” – continues to believe and practice peace, love and understanding, but has re-evaluated her prior drug use, preferring meditation and yoga.

Flower Power at Asian Art Museum

 Peace at de Young Museum