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
“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 San Francisco
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 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love.
Revisiting the Summer of Love
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
- Benjamin Klein of
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
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
- Sherry L. Smith of Southern
- Jeremy Varon of The New School on Identity, Performance, Solidarity: Self and Community in the 1960s Counterculture
Intellectual Origins of the
Counterculture: How Theory Shaped Practice panel:
- James Block of
- Michael J. Kramer of
- 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
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
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
JANUARY 26, 2018
ReplyDeleteWhy Hippie Food Still Matters
Brie Mazurek, CUESA Staff
In his new book Hippie Food: How Back-to-the-Landers, Longhairs, and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat, San Francisco Chronicle food writer Jonathan Kauffman unpacks the rich and often misunderstood history of natural foods, organics, and other counterculture fare…
What was this food counterculture responding to or reacting against?
The Baby Boomer generation was the first generation to grow up on a diet of industrialized food, which took off after World War II…agriculture that relied on chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides. In the 1950s, there was an explosion of innovation in boxed and canned foods, instant products, food additives, and food coloring. The grocery system changed to favor supermarkets, creating a more homogenized and industrialized diet…grew up hearing about the downside of industrialization, such as pesticide contamination. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which came out in 1964, really opened everyone’s eyes to the dangers of DDT. This counterculture was trying to create a new diet that was much more environmentally sustainable and healthy, and that they could make themselves, so they could opt out of the industrialized food system.
In the book, you talk about this moment as the birth of the idea of eating as a political act.
…idea that my personal food choices—what I buy, what I consume—can have these larger political impacts on global hunger, the environment, and capitalism…
What were some of the big innovations in agriculture at this time?
The word “organic” was introduced in the United States in the 1940s by J. I. Rodale, who was the publisher of Organic Farming and Gardening and Prevention magazine. At the time, organic was considered fringe food. The back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s took all of these young people from college towns and cities into rural areas, where they had to figure out how to make a living, and agriculture was one of the main ways they came across. Because they were interested in avoiding pesticides and chemicals, these young farmers adopted Rodale’s ideas and formed associations like CCOF [California Certified Organic Farmers]…built an infrastructure for distributing organic produce, and then created certification bodies.
How did farmers markets help spread and popularize organic?
Farmers markets had all but died out by the early 1970s, and most of the existing markets were just food halls with vendors. The back-to-the-landers were anticapitalist and interested in community and direct sales between farmers and customers. Because so many of their products were niche, they started up a wave of farmers markets…as their primary vehicle for selling organic food.
What do you see as some of the most enduring legacies that have been absorbed into the mainstream from this movement?
The organic industry is the biggest financial success...a $40 billion marketplace…network of natural food stores…availability of natural foods and organics in mainstream grocery stores... most enduring is that the mainstream has accepted the counterculture’s idea of what healthy food is. It’s higher in whole grains. It’s lower in meat. It’s higher in fresh fruits and vegetables. It’s lower in processed sugars. Whether people do or don’t want to eat that way, they certainly recognize that it’s healthier, and so do the government and academic nutritionists. That was not the case in 1975…
In terms of the food counterculture, people’s awareness of the politics of food has also really grown.
…much more focused on race and class, and how to make healthy food accessible within communities where it hasn’t been. People who are on the forefront of the sustainable food movement right now are from communities of color. I think the counterculture movement of the ’70s subconsciously alienated a lot of communities of color. Since the discussion is now coming from within those communities, it’s making connections that need to be made and hopefully giving it more reach.
https://cuesa.org/article/why-hippie-food-still-matters
Support at Home fills service gap for SF seniors, adults with disabilities
ReplyDeleteBy Laura Waxmann on April 8, 2018
…Support at Home, a city-funded pilot program that has been enrolling clients since last August, aims to make in-home care affordable to middle-income San Franciscans who need it. It fills the gap that…an estimated 14,000 other seniors and adults who live with physical and cognitive disabilities fall into.
Classified as “upper-poor,” they have jobs or sources of income that disqualify them from subsidized benefits through Medi-Cal, like free access to In Home Support Supportive Services (IHSS) offered under the state’s low-income health plan, despite a verified need for the service.
The catch is that many senior or disabled San Franciscans who don’t meet the state’s low-income threshold don’t necessarily make enough to pay an average of $28 per hour cost to employ a home care worker out of pocket.
“The income requirements [for Medical] are really low, and asset limits are ridiculous,” said Jessica Lehman, executive director of Senior and Disability Action, one of several advocacy groups that urged The City to fund and test the pilot.
…Support at Home requires a simple one-page application, and clients get signed up within the comfort of their own homes following a referral.
In order to qualify for the program, clients must be 18 years old, San Francisco residents, require assistance with two activities of daily living such as cooking or shopping and be willing to pay a sliding-scale portion of the home care cost, which is determined by income level.
“They can wind up paying as little as $70 per month,” said Laura Liesem, regional director of Community Living Services of the Institute on Aging (IOA), the nonprofit that administers the program. She added that clients “get significantly more care than they can purchase on the market with those dollars.”
Unlike IHSS, clients can have up to $40,000 in assets, not counting a home or a car, and a monthly income of up to 100 percent area median income, which in San Francisco is set at about $80,700 for a single adult, according to Liesem.
In 2016, The City agreed to fund the pilot for Support at Home based on a framework created by its advocates, with some 1.6 million in add-back funding for a period of two years. In that time, the program aims to serve a total of 175 to 250 people.
Shireen McSpadden, director of The City’s Department on Aging and Adult Services, said The City is funding the pilot program “to see if providing [15] hours of home care a week will help them stay safely at home.”
Another goal of the pilot is to ensure that caregivers are paid decent and fair wages. Home care workers who are hired through three contracting companies under the program are paid $15 per hour — a wage that is “higher than the market rate and higher than [San Francisco] minimum wage,” Liesem said.
Throughout its duration, the pilot is actively assessed by a group of health policy experts at UC San Francisco — and its permanent implementation is dependent on positive results.
A challenge that has emerged so far is capturing adults with disabilities who are not seniors.
To date, 96 people are enrolled in the program, and 48 are waiting to be assessed, according to McSpadden. Of the 96, 10 percent are under 60.
”We are seeking a population that hasn’t been served,” said Liesem, adding that services for seniors are often more accessible than for people with disabilities in San Francisco.
Liesem said the point of the program is to make an impact on individual lives with “a small amount of care” that could potentially keep them in their homes and communities…
http://www.sfexaminer.com/support-home-fills-service-gap-sf-seniors-adults-disabilities/