Sonoma County residents share their personal stories from the Summer of Love
Did we really change the world?
By Alexandra Jacopetti Hart
Did 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.
Spiritual encounters, seeking, and other practices also delivered people to the door to one's deeper being. There was something electric in the air, and it touched everything. Consider the music: folk music, especially Joan Baez and the protest songs that soon emerged; Bob Dylan, whose first songs were inspired by Woody Guthrie; popular music, especially the Beatles brought a range of expression; and rock 'n' roll itself with its irrepressible beat and mind-blowing lyrics. These sounds and ideas permeated the consciousness of the nation - and the planet. How could it not change?
Consider the popular slogans of the times:
Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out (Ram Dass): While “Turn On” did mean marijuana to many people, it really meant to find your passion - to get involved with life, not to be passive.
“Tune in” meant to get connected to what was going on around you: cooperate with others. “Drop Out” did often mean dropping out of school or the corporate world or whatever wasn't serving you, but it really meant leaving pre-programmed ideas behind and thinking for yourself, finding your own truth.
“Question Authority” meant to discover what the deeper meaning and deeper truth was, to find the truth and justice in any given path or action.
Many of the early counterculture folks, like Richard Alpert (now Ram Dass) were serious thinkers with desires to improve life through whatever their particular medium was. In small towns like Bolinas or Sonoma's west county, very bright people were looking at the potential problems of and fixes for climate change, pesticide use, resource diminution, war, overconsumption, environmental degradation. They were seeing the need for recycling, social reforms, alternative energy, green building, new approaches to human relations and alternative healthcare, just to name a few. Independence, creativity, sharing and caring, loving and natural processes were primary values.
In some cases, real progress was made, that we still see evolving today:
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