Another set of thoughts written in the early 1990s, harking back to the Long Ago:
From 1967 through 1968, I dwelt in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco, so I guess that made me a hippie (never much cared for the term, myself). Few people wore flags, most couldn't afford a VW bus. The image the "outside world" had of hippies was often of the people we called weekenders...people who lived nice safe lives during the week and cruised the Haight on weekends, looking for "sex, drugs, and rock and roll." Many, if not most, of the people that lived there were trying to build a better society, or at least trying to point out what was wrong with the society at the time.
I applaud Jane Fonda. The US of then was very imperialistic and needed an ass-kicking. We're not much better today. There are all sorts of people in this world with all sorts of beliefs, and I will probably get flamed for my views, but I think many countries are much more civilized than ours and we have no right to impose our values on them.
From my experience there, I chose to become a teacher, not only of mathematics, but of people. Altruistic, maybe, but I have tried to make the world better a few people at a time.
Make Love, Not War may sound trite to you, but the sentiment was indeed heartfelt. I am vehemently pacifist. The worst two years of my life were when I was finally caught dodging the draft and taught how to kill people by the US Army. In today's world,
I could have gotten out by admitting my transsexuality...back then, it might have gotten me killed.
Drugs? Sure, we took them. Sometimes in mass quantities. But many of us could function quite well in that state, regardless of the image painted for the public by Dragnet and other anti-libertarian shows. For some it truly was a mind-expanding experience. For some, it was escapism from the pain of everyday existence. I guess I fall into both categories.
As far as robbing banks is concerned: few of us supported the actions of the Weather Underground and other like groups. As I said, most of us were pacifist.
Haight Street in the late 60s and other like places around the world, were social experiments. Ultimately, the older, conservative generation squelched such places (Haight died when Ronnie Reagan was elected Governor of California). The experiment was not a total failure though. I think it did a lot of good for society, especially in empowering people to speak out against and stand up to the government when it is wrong, which is the onus placed upon us by the Founders.
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This memory had been stored away and has just recently come back:
Why had it been forgotten? As Country Joe McDonald put it:
"Anyone who remembers the '60s wasn't there." Or possibly it was the nature of the incident.
Back in my hippie days...
I felt like I was always the outsider, even among the people living on the fringes of society. I would make a few friends...at least I thought of them as friends, but I never was very optimistic about how they felt about me. I would hang out with them until I perceived in some way that they would prefer that I not do so. It could be something blatant like someone telling me to go away or something that might have been only in my mind, a feeling that I was overstaying my welcome. When one has no sense of self-worth, it's easy to imagine all sorts of reasons people would not want them around, so I never had any friends for very long. Eventually I would go try to find someone new to hang out with.
Once upon a time there was a girl named Alice and a man named Paul Simon (no, not the songwriter...and it probably wasn't his real name). Paul and I used to crash in Buena Vista park when the weather wasn't too bad. Paul did it almost always...he hated sleeping indoors. There were some other people who slept in the park: Morningstar was a woman from New York. Scorpio was a young gay boy also from there (he once put the moves on me, but I defended myself gracefully). The four of us would hang out together, panhandling for money for food, or the food itself, or money for drugs, or for the drugs themselves. :)
Then we met Alice. Alice had run away from Santa Clara, was perhaps 17. She had no place to stay and looked ever-so-cute in her hippie dress. We sort of started looking after her. It turned out that Alice didn't like sleeping in the park and she said she had some money at her house in Santa Clara so she and I hitchhiked down there and she broke into her house and got her savings bonds and we went to the bank and cashed them and hitched back to the Haight and rented an apartment. I rented the apartment for the rest of us since I was the oldest except for Paul and he declined to be connected with any paperwork.
The apartment was on Waller and Shrader...the former store room of a feed and grain store (the purpose of a feed and grain store in the Haight was something I could never fathom). On the door we painted "Alice's Restaurant" (okay, so we weren't very original). It had two rooms that we used as bedrooms and a kitchen that we hardly ever used (I recall using it to make popped birdseed once upon a time...we had no corn and the birdseed was leftover from the place's days as a storage room).
We mostly used it as a place to crash, often inviting other people of the street to crash there with us, and as a place to get stoned, which we did often. It was only a block from our favorite panhandling areas and we found that we could keep up with the rent for a few months if we worked hard doing that and selling the tourists the hippie newspapers.
Our little group of friends grew over time. Alice met Danny, from Kansas, and they became a couple. Then I met someone. I've been trying to remember her name, but that hasn't come back to me yet. I'm pretty certain that it started with a "C" or "Ch" (and no, I'm positive it was not a Christine variation). [I now recall that it was Charlotte--ed]
What I do remember is that we hit it off and I really liked her. We used to go for walks in Golden Gate Park and sometimes we would lay down and do a little necking or just nap next to each other in the sun. I invited her to move in with us and she did. Being a virgin at the time I was more than a little nervous about her doing so. I was very happy with the way our friendship was going and was in no hurry to move on to a level that made either of us uncomfortable. But that was hard since we were sharing the same mattress. Inevitably, I guess, we found ourselves making out on the mattress one night and it seemed that perhaps we might go a little beyond that when she stopped me. She told me that we couldn't go any further and that the reason was because she was pre-op transsexual.
My memory of everything ends right there. I'm pretty certain I went off the deep end for a while. I hope that I acted well...I can't imagine that I said anything unkind. But in the face of my own problems, I couldn't cope.