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Turn on, tune in, drop out--it seems as if hippies have

By Carl Heintze

Back in the 1960s, when I was a lot younger than I am now, I paid a visit one day to the Haight-Ashbury Medical Clinic.

The clinic was then on the second floor of an old house, as I remember it, at the corner of Ashbury and Haight streets in San Francisco, and it devoted most of its attention to the treatment of young hippies who had overdosed on any one of a number of hallucinogenic drugs then being peddled around the district.

No one was quite sure what anyone was ingesting, nor for that matter what a hippie was. In general, though, the idea seemed to be to dress in as bizarre a costume as one could find. I remember seeing one young man clutching a twisted cane made from an oak branch or something, carrying a tin cup (with which he occasionally begged coins) and wearing a battered Army surplus field jacket and an indescribable hat while limping along the street. Whether he was really partly disabled or whether it was all part of his act, it was difficult to tell. There were a lot of hippies like that, so I was told.

Some of them wore three-piece suits on work days and wandered into the Haight-Ashbury and other such centers on weekends, suitably clad in their hippie costumes looking for whatever the traffic would bear.

Hippiedom was that vague, and equally vague was where it all came from and eventually where it all went. The Haight-Ashbury and the Free Clinic (for it truly was free to all comers) are still around, but the hippies are mostly gone.

Where they came from and why remains one of the unsolved mysteries of American modern history. Some historians contend they were a result of the Vietnam War--and undoubtedly the protracted years of that war had something to do with protest.

But Flower Power, as it was sometimes called, the revolt against the Establishment (whatever that may have been, real or perceived) was more than a protest against the war. It also was a protest against the previous generation (now sometimes unfairly called the Greatest Generation), against a growing materialism, against technology, against The Bomb, against a lot of things.

Indeed, it probably was a protest against most everything young people perceived as wrong and standing in their way as they grew up.

It manifested itself in rock music (Janis Joplin, Jimmy Hendrix, the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, to name but a few), in the abuse of drugs and alcohol (though alcohol was considered by many hippies to be the drug of their parents and the one their parents abused) and ultimately it found its most extreme expression in The Weathermen and Weatherwomen who touted Days of Rage, tried to blow things up (including sometimes themselves) and who went underground and when they did became, not surprisingly perhaps, just like everyone else.

The hippie years had their effect not only on those who were among its participants, but also those who weren't. One could make a case for the conservative movement that has blossomed in the beginning of this century as a reaction to the wild days of the middle of the last one. Americans, on the whole, don't like disorder any more than any other society, and as Americans always do, they tended to overreact to whatever the revolution seems to be.

In this case the revolution seemed about the overturn of all the "family values" that had persisted through World War II: God, country, the flag, the family and the sanctity of marriage, as the conservatives saw it and still see it.

As for the hippies, they faded away as rapidly as they appeared. They were children of protest, all right, but it was an undisciplined, uncertain, unfocused protest and without a goal; it really didn't have anywhere to go.

Those of us who lived through it, though, sometimes wonder (as perhaps do the conservatives) if it might not come back someday. There is, after all, another war on, a highly unpopular war. Yet somehow it's different.

This war has fewer casualties. Vietnam, after all, was immensely expensive in many ways to the generation that gave birth to the hippies, including human life. Walk into any Veterans Affairs clinic someday if you don't believe this. Most are populated with the wreckage of Vietnam.

But this war also is being fought not by a conscript army, but by volunteers. While one can argue about how voluntary their volunteering may be, they are in Iraq because they chose to serve, not because they were drafted. Their commitment is different.

And so is the effect the present war is having on the nation. So far no hippies, no protest, no Flower Power, no defining symbol of protest has appeared. Nor, it seems to me, is it likely.

The world has changed, a generation has grown up and passed into middle age; psychedelic is passe. History does not repeat itself nor can we expect it to.