COMMENTARY
LOOK WHO’S WORRYING ABOUT PROPERTY VALUES NOW
On more than one occasion in this space I have noted that my generation, the Generation of ’68, made every mistake in the political/social book as we tried to find an alternative to the capital/imperialist norms of that day. But in our youth those were only mistakes of inexperience or high expectations. Now we are, apparently, going to have our noses rubbed in those mistakes from sources that at one time we considered our allies. To wit.
The Summer of Love in 1967 was a time of great experimentation with drugs, sex, lifestyles, communalist living, primitive communism, etc. and no place was so associated with that experience as the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, the central headquarters for the love generation. If you could not personally get to California you at least, through the grapevine, lived vicariously the experiences you were told were emanating from that locale. A recent newspaper article, however, gives further meaning to that old expression that ‘you cannot go home again’. Apparently a significant number of those who survived the Summer of Love stayed in the area. And why not, San Francisco is hardly the worst place to hang your hat. However those survivors are now owners of valuable property in the formerly run down but now 'hot' local real estate market.
How does this all add together? Well, apparently there has been a never-ending trail of adventurous, hardy and or ‘lost’ kids to that Mecca. In short, kids keep going there for all the same reasons as those who went in the summer of ’67. But with this caveat. Forty years of political reaction and various pandemics has done a terrible job on the political and social consciousness of the youth so that today’s refugees are not the middle class kids on a final lark before getting serious about helping run the capitalist state. Rather they are the ‘rejects’ thrown off by the dysfunctional nuclear family, especially from the working class and the working poor. And while they still go there and are as “uncivilized” as we seemed to be to the ‘squares’ of those days the ex-“flower” children who made it stand in fear of lose of property values when the ‘hooligans’ descend on their lawns. One could, at this point, bring out all the old clichés about how the aging process makes one more conservative and all of that to round out this piece. That, however, seems redundant. But damn, one doesn’t have to like what has happened to some ‘fallen’ comrades. And I don’t. Enough said
LOOK WHO’S WORRYING ABOUT PROPERTY VALUES NOW
On more than one occasion in this space I have noted that my generation, the Generation of ’68, made every mistake in the political/social book as we tried to find an alternative to the capital/imperialist norms of that day. But in our youth those were only mistakes of inexperience or high expectations. Now we are, apparently, going to have our noses rubbed in those mistakes from sources that at one time we considered our allies. To wit.
The Summer of Love in 1967 was a time of great experimentation with drugs, sex, lifestyles, communalist living, primitive communism, etc. and no place was so associated with that experience as the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, the central headquarters for the love generation. If you could not personally get to California you at least, through the grapevine, lived vicariously the experiences you were told were emanating from that locale. A recent newspaper article, however, gives further meaning to that old expression that ‘you cannot go home again’. Apparently a significant number of those who survived the Summer of Love stayed in the area. And why not, San Francisco is hardly the worst place to hang your hat. However those survivors are now owners of valuable property in the formerly run down but now 'hot' local real estate market.
How does this all add together? Well, apparently there has been a never-ending trail of adventurous, hardy and or ‘lost’ kids to that Mecca. In short, kids keep going there for all the same reasons as those who went in the summer of ’67. But with this caveat. Forty years of political reaction and various pandemics has done a terrible job on the political and social consciousness of the youth so that today’s refugees are not the middle class kids on a final lark before getting serious about helping run the capitalist state. Rather they are the ‘rejects’ thrown off by the dysfunctional nuclear family, especially from the working class and the working poor. And while they still go there and are as “uncivilized” as we seemed to be to the ‘squares’ of those days the ex-“flower” children who made it stand in fear of lose of property values when the ‘hooligans’ descend on their lawns. One could, at this point, bring out all the old clichés about how the aging process makes one more conservative and all of that to round out this piece. That, however, seems redundant. But damn, one doesn’t have to like what has happened to some ‘fallen’ comrades. And I don’t. Enough said
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