Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan & her Summer of Love comment. Gave me pause & reflection. In case you weren't born yet, or lived the experience through purple haze,
Here are some facts regarding the #SummerofLove
#SanFrancisco #protest2020 #autonomouszone #mayorjenny

The summer of 1967 has taken on an almost mythical magic, a psychedelic “summer of love” with "beautiful people" turning on, tuning in & dropping out from Hyde Park to Haight-Ashbury, a 25-square-block almost autonomous zone of San Francisco filled with liberated free thinkers.

San Francisco 1967: Young people attracted by the the chance to piss off their conservative elders & experiment with drugs & sex. "Flower Power" they said,mixed with rock & roll,drugs, liberated sex, weird clothes, underground propaganda, antiwar sentiment,& communal experiments.

This blend of kumbaya idealism, opportunism, combined with a social climate that provided just the right mix of receptiveness for a revolution. The always springtime climate of the Bay Area enticed the temptation for many across the US to come to Frisco with flowers in their hair

Although distracted by chemistry,The hippies had a plan for their new community. For community had come. What kind of community, upon what model? A group called the Diggers (derived their name from a 17th century British anarchist collective) had a vision for this utopia..

The Diggers were a radical community-action group of activists, Communists & Improvisational actors who happened to be based in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco. Their politics were a blend of leftist /anarchist

with a desire for freedom with a consciousness of the community in which they lived. Diggers are credited with the phrases “Do your own thing” & “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” They were at the forefront of what would soon become a nationwide commune movement.

The world the Diggers wanted was free — free of money. After all, the ways needing & getting money limit one’s personal mobility & spontaneity where a "Free" community would take care of one another. "FREE"

For months,the Diggers had been serving hot food daily in Golden Gate Park. Digger women cooked soups & stews in big steel milk cans with donated grains, meat “liberated” from packing houses.

At the Diggers’ Free Store — the motto was “It’s free because it’s yours” — people were encouraged to leave unwanted articles for others to take home.

They secured edible but unsightly rejects from the city’s wholesale vegetable markets — all secured for free. Borrowing a local church kitchen, they baked miniature loaves of whole wheat bread in empty coffee cans.

A journalist recalls being brought there as a child by her mother:“There was an awe-inspiring compassion in the air as prostitutes stood alongside school kids; black, white, & Native Americans; gays, bisexuals, transvestites,& professors, all waited for their food while chatting.

The Diggers & their hippie friends staged “sit-ins” in the middle of intersections, tying up traffic for hours. Sound familiar?

The Diggers & their Hippie guests strongly defended their new utopia. As one Hippie put it “We are creating a new kind of art; a new kind of human relationship & a new family relationship.”The Hippies shunned traditionally monogamous relationships for polyamory. FREE LOVE BABY!

Free Love as in anything free, always has a price.. A local Doctor who was concerned by what he saw, opened up a free health clinic. The first day brought in 250 people, 350 the next.

They came in with gonorrhea, and other forms of clap, there were injuries from botched abortions as well as cut feet and colds, pneumonia and hepatitis. They also sought help for malnutrition.

There were also all kinds of gastrointestinal disorders from eating rotten food, not to mention hallucinations and bad trips from the plentiful drugs on the street. Soon the problem would become epidemic.

Speaking of those botched abortions, Such experiences with abortions gone bad helped lead some states to
further liberalize their abortion laws until 1973 when the U.S. Supreme
Court decided Roe v. Wade, a ruling that still divides Americans to this very day.

Another somber note brushed under the tie dyed rug of history was the sexist policies and increase in the numbers of rape. As time went on & competing communes struggled to maintain essential resources.

People were even selling their girlfriend’s bodies to horny men for drugs, food or money.Even though money was looked down upon by many hippies, women sometimes served as a form of replacement currency.

“Women were used as an inducement to get new members into a commune or crash pad. If you joined, you got to have sex with the girls or guys, whatever floated your boat.

A growing porn scene became apparent as smut peddlers quickly took advantage of the broke kids on the street, paying them with food, drugs or money. Many of the roots of modern era pornography took root during the Summer of Love.

About rape, a local paper wrote “rape is as common as bullshit on Haight Street” . #Rape seemingly occurred so frequently it was not taken seriously in the neighborhood. There seemed to be no shock whenever rape news was passed around Haight Ashbury.

Blurring the lines between Rape & Free love was the sexist view of sex among the hippies. Hippie women were expected to be just as available to the men in their own crowd. For many of the guys, free love really meant free sex.

Meanwhile the numbers of people coming to the streets of Haight-Ashbury filled with tens of thousands of itinerant, indigent,& intoxicated flower children, and soon suddenly found themselves in the center of a massive drug epidemic,

The police, who at first looked the other way began to criminalize marijuana & soon after marijuana became scarce, Heroin became the drug of choice and dealers competed & murdered each other to get it to their voracious strung out customers.

People were dying from it and for it. People were overdosing. People were dying from the symptoms and consequences of the drugs. So many people were sick, starving, lost, and addicted. (Photo not from San Francisco)

The drug abuse even led to Hepatitis C in the community because people were sharing needles. Alcohol, once frowned upon by the Hippie culture was sought after by the youths desperate for any kind of high..

There were constant skirmishes with the Police("the fuzz", or more popularly phrased "Pigs").

The Intoxicating romance of Free Love, Free Stuff, Drugs & Rock & Roll gave way to a harsh reality. With all of these problems slithering around the Haight Ashbury neighborhood, the Hippies began to lose hope. Some even left the city and went to communes.

They were encouraged to leave the Haight by leaders of the neighborhood. The Diggers even began to lose hope. And as the Summer waned, the Diggers staged a funeral of the Hippie era..

In the beginning of the Haight experiment, The Diggers wanted to turn the Haight into a free city. They “saw Haight Ashbury as potentially a money-free, & non-capitalist society. But, their vision was burned down with the Summer of Love.

After months of dishing out free food, free housing, and free love, the Diggers were overwhelmed and exhausted.
But as the many strung out Hippies were soon to find out, no high lasts forever...

Eventually a decent buzz becomes harder to sustain. At first you chase the high in the bright sunlight with energy and enthusiasm because it feels so damned good; but there comes a time when the high proves elusive.

You catch glimpses of it as it disappears down deeper and darker alleyways. The Chinese have a saying for this, it's called "Chasing The Dragon".

The Summer of Love was not a purple hazed, love fest in wrapped in a concert, it was a horrid disaster. The truth about this disaster deserves to be told.

It would take a few more years of pain & despair to finally kill the Hippie era. The murders of MLK & RFK. A disastrous FREE concert where the Hell's Angels were hired to provide security became known for its considerable violence,

including the stabbing death of a concert goer & 3 accidental deaths while scores were injured, and numerous cars stolen as well as extensive property damage.

The Manson Family, a cult who coincidentally started out in San francisco later to move to abandoned house in Topanga Canyon would go on a murder spree killing 5 people including actress Sharon Tate, in hopes of sparking a race war.

Cold-case investigators & others long have believed that Charles Manson and his cult followers were responsible for many more deaths..

There was Kent State: Fake news reported it as innocent, peaceful protestors shot by the national Guard ( early days of Fake News) . Go ahead and research yourself it's deserving of a long thread of its own.

Despite its early promise of peace & love, the ’60s had died a terrible death. A death bathed in blood, choking on shattered dreams and littered with acid casualties, addictions & overdoses.

In the end, The event left an indelible mark our society. There's no question that we are still living with the “free love” fallout. Everything from the broken nuclear family, The drug culture, the rise of Viagra to porn,

to the sex education debate, the abortion debate, and as a reactionary opposite extreme result, the Christian fundamentalist backlash, then there's the indelible leftist mark the subculture has left on the city by the bay to this very day..

All of the above, bear the mark of that bohemian sexual revolutionary experiment called The Summer of Love ( ahh que the flute music). Most of the above bears a resemblance to what is and what will happen in Seattle.