Summer of Love exemplified lack of moderation

By Carl Heintze

Ken Kesey's death a few weeks ago reminds me of my own brief dip into the Summer of Love.

The Summer of Love, as many may no longer recall, was the summer of 1968 when San Francisco was awash in hippies. When drugs, particularly mind-altering drugs, were as common as alcohol, and when it seemed the nation's youth would try most anything from taking off their clothes at a moment's notice (sometimes known as "flashing") to protesting our growing involvement in the Vietnam War.

The center of San Francisco's Summer of Love was Haight and Ashbury streets near the Golden Gate Park Panhandle. That was where the Free Clinic lay in the upper story of an old house. As a matter of fact, I think that's where it still is. Some things never change.

The Free Clinic treated anyone with a drug problem, and there were plenty of drug problems, partly because much of the time no one was quite sure what they were ingesting. Mostly drugs were recommended by color, not content, and the effects of these compounds could produce anything from LSD trips to heroin addiction.

I went to the Free Clinic with two friends, one a doctor who was a volunteer there at least once a week, the other a lawyer, who had a teen-age daughter and wondered what she might be getting into. I don't know what we expected, but what we got was, to say the least, bizarre. People, mostly under the age of 30, were wandering about in all sorts of odd costumes.

They also all were doing their best to behave as if there was no tomorrow. As I ascended the stairs to the second floor, a young woman in her 20s, bopped me over the head with some papers, stared at me, but said nothing.

Our guide, a young man with a kind of serape over his shoulders, said, "Oh, don't pay any attention, she's playing mind games."

Shortly thereafter a boy of perhaps 19 told me with great seriousness, "The thing you have to remember is that you don't have to work. You just don't have to do anything."

Ken Kesey, who pretty much despised The Establishment, as did most hippies, was a part of this scene, although I never met him. If you want to know more about Kesey, read Tom Wolfe's The Electric Acid Kool Aid Test.

Like so much in American life, the Summer of Love came and went very quickly. Kesey went off to live on a ranch in Oregon. The various hippies either fried their brains with LSD or other drugs and sank into oblivion or stuck their costumes in the closet and became stockbrokers, doctors, lawyers and software engineers.

Some of them emerged again in the new age of American excess, the recent dot-com revolution, aging, still apparently not able to adhere to the golden mean.

Well, I'm afraid America is like that. We don't seem to be able to live in moderation. From rushing in search of venture capital, we are now rushing in search of Osma bin Laden.

Of course, we didn't ask him Sept. 11. He, or rather his henchmen, showed up, and we have rushed off after him halfway across the world in one of the most unfriendly of places--Afghanistan.

Understand, it's not that I'm unpatriotic. I just wish once in awhile we could have a decade or two when the boat doesn't rock or appear to be sinking.

I don't think we asked for the Summer of Love to happen, either, but it did.

But we also were partly responsible for it. By the time we had figured out that it wasn't really love that drove the summer after all, but irresponsibility, by the time we surrendered the phony dream of an anti-industrial world embodied in the hippie movement for reality, it was all over and we were embarked on a new voyage into the unknown.

And that, it seems to me, is where we are now. We are shooting off somewhere, but where and what the results will be remain a mystery.

If you'll notice, the television networks have had trouble trying to hang a label on our present situation. They've gone from "Attack on America" to "War on Terror." No easy label seems likely.

Nor does the crystal ball tell us what the ultimate end of it all is going to be. But if it is like the Summer of Love, it is going to send us in a radically different direction--and fast.

So hold onto your hats, fasten your seatbelts and hang in there. Both you and I are in for some surprises.

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Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to the Los Gatos Weekly-Times.

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