The Legacy of the Hippies

I guess this is what you get when you exalt those with the lowest opportunity cost of their time.

The Summer of Love actually began in January 1967 with the Human Be-In, a Haight-Ashbury community event that the San Francisco Oracle, an alternative newspaper, called “the gathering of the tribes.” Some 20,000 showed up in Golden Gate Park for a day of political discussion, music, dancing, and drug experimentation. Allen Ginsberg, the Grateful Dead, and Baba Ram Dass (né Richard Alpert) were there, and Timothy Leary used the occasion to coin the phrase “Turn on, tune in, drop out.”

But as with most too-good-to-be-true events, the party was over by the time the hordes arrived, and by the end of the summer, the dream had turned into a nightmare, the utopian vision disintegrating into homelessness, drug addiction, and violence. A “Death of the Hippie” funeral was even staged in October to mark the end of an era, when local activists—mainly just hippies who’d gotten there first—became disgusted with the influx of newcomers and exhorted them to go home. The city, and certainly a small neighborhood, wasn’t equipped to handle a flood of cash-poor young people. Social services got stretched to their limits, and health problems, including sexually transmitted diseases, spread.

Story here. Link via Fark.