August, 1967
"If you're going to San Francisco
Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.
If you're going to San Francisco
You're gonna meet some gentle people there.
For those who come to San Francisco
Summertime will be a love-in there."
Written by John Phillips, of the Mamas and the Papas. Sung by Scott McKenzie
 |
| Click: If You're Going to San Francisco |
August 20 is high season for cantaloupes in Southern Oregon. I have grown them nearly every summer since I was 11 years old.
Cantaloupe seasons fade into a fuzzy blend, but August of 1967 remains distinct.
I don't grow melons commercially anymore. Growing cantaloupes for sale means carrying 40-pound bins of melons to the edge of a row to put into the back of a pickup truck, and then to unload them into a wash basin, then to repack melons in 44-pound boxes, sold as 40-pounds so as to give "good weight." Then to reload them, bring them to market to unload them and stack the boxes so the produce people can take over. About three years ago I began getting back-aches and tingles down my arms in August of every year. It was time to stop. Now I just grow a few to eat myself, for old time's sake.
I was firmly rooted in place in August, 1967. I had two jobs and a girlfriend. But on the AM radio in the family Chrysler Newport, I could hear sounds of something new and enticing. The music was like the green light in the distance that represented hope for Gatsby in The Great Gatsby, a book we were assigned to read in Mrs. Lininger's English class my junior year in high school. He could see the light, but like Daisy, the woman he longed for, it was out of reach.
I have a framed photo of myself in the cantaloupe field taken in August, 1967. I am on the right, with my father and younger brother, David, the one holding watermelons. To the left are two cousins, Mike and Doug Sage, visiting from Syracuse, New York.
I am wearing my forest-fire-fighting clothes in the photo. Five days a week, from 10:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., I stood ready to put out forest fires in the low-elevation brush lands that dry out each summer in our Mediterranean climate. That job gave me time in the mornings to rush to the farm at daylight, pick the melons that came ripe the previous day, and get them to Mr. Blunt's fruit stand and to Thunderbird Supermarket, then be at work at 10:00. I earned about $750 every summer fighting forest fires and another $1,250 from my half of the melon crop: $2,000 saved per summer. Tuition at Harvard in 1967 was $1,760. I could earn and save a Harvard tuition. In mid-August, 1967 I had four more weeks before I got onto the plane for Boston.
I remember feeling I was on the brink of something, so close but still so far. There was college, of course, but there was also something big for my generation happening only 6 hours away by car. "Hippies" -- guys with long hair and beards; women who wore loose blouses and no bra -- were crowding into San Francisco. They had shed old modes of thinking, we thought. There was a new music sound I could hear on AM radio that made prior-years' songs of surfing and daddy's T-Bird seem childish. Bob Dylan sang that Mr. Jones didn't know what was going on. Barry McGuire warned we were on the eve of destruction. There was a new generation of music: Jefferson Airplane, The Byrds, the Grateful Dead, Simon and Garfunkel, and Jimi Hendrix. Their music suggested change was underway. There were endless possibilities. Our generation had an anthem:
All across the nation such a strange vibration
People in motion.
There's a whole generation with a new explanationPeople in motion, people in motion.
The open-ended future lay before us. Our parent's generation had screwed up everything, we thought, but not to worry. We were going to fix everything.
[Note: To get daily delivery of this blog to your email go to: https://petersage.substack.com and subscribe. The blog is free and always will be.]
13 comments:
And now that generation moved to Florida and like DeSantis. What happened?
Yes, what happened? The boomers have been a giant disappointment from a political perspective. We were supposed to be about peace and to love one another right now. Instead boomers are the political force of bigotry and anti democratic behaviors. As we age out and die, maybe the country will survive and the younger generations will save things like we were supposed to do, but didn’t.
“Our parent's generation had screwed up everything, we thought, but not to worry. We were going to fix everything.”
And boy, did we! They were called “The Greatest Generation.” I wonder what our offspring will be labeling us.
We need to remember that the Hippie generation (a small group) ran into strong headwinds from the Establishment. In order to get ahead one conformed or withered. The Yippies, draft dodgers and Anti-Vietnam War movement, the Civil Rights Movement, the Cultists and Communes splintered the force and flow. Free love and drugs directed many of us into a vast wasteland of wasted lives. Entrenched power would not yield. Heroes of our time were found to have feet of clay. The Great Disillusionment was underway. The moment Clean Gene lost the Democratic nomination and the Chicago Riot of 1968 was brutally smashed marked the high-water mark of idealism and belief that we could actually experience a Woodstock Moment sweep the nation. In order to try to live our lives and fight for the cause we faced the personal economic reality and started families, got jobs in corporations, many that were antithetical to the lyrics of the songs we sang and enjoyed. The forces in the world that our fathers and mothers faced delivered to America the Greatest Generation, as the US was united in World War Two. Every time a situation arose that appeared to bring us all together individualism, fear or greed fractured and deflated the effort. At this point I am not sure current Climate Change effects facing to world population will have a salutary effect. I can only hope my children and grandchildren are up to the task, as we kick the can down the road.
The Greatest Generation defeated fascism, created fundamental infrastructure such as the interstate highway system and supported affordable education. They left their children a better life. Like Peter, I was able to pay for college with summer jobs and work/study programs.
Now, one of our major political parties is fast descending into the madness of fascism, we’ve barely even maintained the infrastructure we were given and college students are graduating tens of thousands of dollars in debt. Our children’s future is jeopardized by the problems we’re leaving them. Peace and love may have been a hippie pipe dream, but greed and lust for power continue to dominate our political and business landscape.
“When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.” – Jimi Hendrix
I was part of the counterculture of the 1960s. I was a hippie. We smoked dope, and dropped acid, and ventured out into the realms of Cosmic Consciousness and hippie Buddhism. We thought the sheer attractive power of what our music expressed would change the world.
And then, just a few years later, something like 90% of my hippie brothers and sisters were doing cocaine, wearing polyester leisure suits, and dancing to mindless disco. They were just trend victims, along for the ride for a while, but not really part of it.
The world, it turned out, was too big; we were too small. Hunter Thompson expressed it brilliantly in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:
“It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era — the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run... but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant...
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning...
And that, I think, was the handle — that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply PREVAIL. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave...
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high water mark — that place where the wave finally broke, and rolled back.”
There’s a lifecycle aspect to this.
When you’re young, you’re full of idealism and new ideas. Some of those ideas are good, and the world would benefit from their implementation. Others are not good, and the consequences of them would be catastrophic.
Young people are not good at figuring out which is which. Pol Pot was idealistic; that idealism did not help the Cambodian people. Old people tend to be cautious about new ideas; they have seen some of the idealistic new ideas of their youths go very, very wrong.
Young people add energy; old people add friction. Both are necessary. I added plenty of energy in my youth. Now, I add plenty of friction. My political participation is age-appropriate. 😀
"Pol Pot was idealistic."
WTF? Pol Pot conducted a rule of terror that led to the deaths of nearly a quarter of Cambodia's seven million people, by the most widely accepted estimates, through execution, torture, starvation and disease. It sounds like you took a few too many trips.
I guess if Pol Pot was idealistic, the same could be said of Josef Stalin who starved several million Ukrainisns to death during the Great Depression. Snark font not working on yhis platform.
Pol's aim was to plunge the country into an inferno of revolutionary change where, certainly, old ideas and those who refused to abandon them would perish in the flames, but from which Cambodia itself would emerge, strengthened and purified, as a paragon of communist virtue.
— Journalist Philip Short, 2004
—————————-
Sounds idealistic to me.
Similar to Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Similar to what SDS and the Progressive Labor Party might have accomplished in this country in the 1960s if they had been able to achieve their revolutionary goals.
And when you look at the defenestrations and struggle sessions perpetrated by the woke in our current time, possibly similar to what they would do if they gained total power.
Michael -
I don't believe slaughtering their fellow citizens was ever the goal of SDS, the Progressive Labor Party or the "woke." Comparing them to the Khmer Rouge is sick and wrong.
Data released by the Anti-Defamation League shows that 96 percent of incidents in the last decade in which extremists killed someone were committed by people motivated by right-wing ideologies. In other words, get a clue.
The SDSers who became the Weather Underground wanted to kill Americans. Kathy Boudin went to prison for felony murder in connection with this. I mention her in particular because her son Chesa Boudin was recently the San Francisco district attorney, and that's another story with ramifications in current politics. "Off the pigs" means "kill the pigs." As for Progressive Labor, my understanding is that PL came under the influence of Lyndon LaRouche and evolved into a far right group with an antisemitic conspiratorial bent. We who lived through this stuff in the '60s and '70s will be debating the fine points until there are no more of us left. I'm anonymous so I don't get in trouble; I still think the FBI is out to get Democrats, even though Hugh Hewitt seems to think the FBI is now out to get Republicans; and some Republicans say the FBI's current mission is to protect the "Biden crime family." G-d bless America.
People can get pretty crazy when they gain absolute power, as history has often demonstrated. Mike can spew insults all he wants (assuming Peter continues to allow Mike to display his personal psychopathology in this way), but those insults do not detract from the points I am making.
Violent extremism is a problem, regardless, of whether it comes from the left or the right. In the summer and fall of 2020, Portland saw around 100 days of violent rioting from extremists on the left. Mike’s reference to violence from right wing extremists is a debate tactic often described as “whataboutism“. My reply is we should condemn violent extremism from whichever side it comes from.
Post a Comment