#haight and ashbury | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

aprillikesthings · 25 days ago

Text

youtube

I only ever watched the first twenty minutes of this a couple of years ago so I'm watching this today (yes, for my fic ahaha) and will note my thoughts:

"they're AGAINST so many things but are they FOR anything?" I mean, ....some of them were

The opening scene where he's walking down the street and a bunch of hippies start walking with him and grinning is hilarious

There's a shot of a young woman who is supposedly having "a freak out" (a bad trip) being dragged into the hospital by cops, and she sounds somewhat lucid to me ("do my friends know where I am? where are you taking me??? where am I??") but also, I don't think putting her in a cop car and dragging her to the hospital was likely to improve her mental state. (All they can do is give you a bed, keep an eye on you, and maybe sedate you; tho I suspect they also just restrained people sometimes.)

they interview a doctor who says "there's no way to predict who will have a bad trip [on LSD]" but we sorta did know how to prevent them?? Set and setting was talked about for years already. That said: a lot of people of that era did in fact use it very irresponsibly, or did stupidly high doses, and even gave it to people without their consent.

"They try to live without money but still beg" I mean. yeah the problem is that you can't live without money. But some of them were trying to make money obsolete to some extent (like the Diggers).

Watching a scene recorded at the offices of the San Francisco Oracle, I can't help thinking "man those would be worth money now" (I checked ebay just now--actual print copies of original issues are in the $100 range)(I have scans on DVD, which is by far the cheapest way to own/read it)

They interview a guy working there and he says "life should be a joy, and it's a drag!" and he talks about the "absurdity" of people driving to work every day in metal boxes by themselves, and like, he's not wrong. He also mentions the "alienation of middle-class life" which again: not wrong, especially at the time. Suburban life was just so much more stifling.

"They want a group of mutual support and affection to belong to" Well yeah that's. a normal human desire?? Does Harry Reasoner think that's a bad thing?

Oh hey they cover the Diggers feeding people in the Panhandle once a day: "This feeding typifies the hippie ideal of standing apart from society by means of mutual help and love. It contains its own ironies, for the daily feed is itself dependent on the food being offered by the very society that is being rejected" jfc so much of this just has big "And yet you participate in society!! Curious. I am very intelligent" energy lol

Okay so a doctor dude calls out how hippies say they love everyone in a very general sense but are incapable of loving another specific person that "might make demands of them," and tbh I think that was sometimes true. He also talks about how many of them seem to be using LSD because they struggle with managing negative feelings (especially anger), and again: not entirely wrong. (It's worth noting that in interviews with people who'd been teenagers during the Summer of Love, there were a LOT of stories of people escaping abusive homes, including numerous accounts of CSA, which imho puts the "they do LSD bc they can't deal with negative emotions" in a very different light)

A couple of hippies point out: Y'know we do drugs in part just to increase our sensory experience, right?? Like it's great listening to music on it. You know that, right????

"LSD will damage your chromosomes!!" Thankfully, that one was disproven.

So they interview a young guy in a psych ward about his experiences with LSD, and this poor kid describes what was obviously severe social anxiety, and that taking LSD a few times cured it--he was no longer anxious that other people would reject him, because LSD gave him that (very common on LSD) effect of feeling "at one" with all people/living things/the universe, and instilled in him the concept that all humans are beautiful. "I'm not afraid of people anymore, because even if they reject me, they're still beautiful." Harry Reasoner is like "but it's fake" my dude shut up. oh my god. Harry: "but what about dangerous people?" Kid: "yeah, there's dangerous people, but they're still beautiful." Harry' just like "okay but you SHOULD be afraid of other people" and the kid's just like. Nah.

Like, they're researching using hallucinogens for treating things like anxiety NOW. Because it sometimes works!

Tbh this kid seems pretty lucid and smart. And the reason he's in there is that he "talked about God too much" so his mother had him committed.

Harry: "So tell me what God's like." Kid: "First of all God is everything, so he's like everything. He is everything. There's nothing that he isn't." This kid doesn't seem crazy to me. He's saying shit tons and tons of people have said!! Someone give him a copy of Julian of Norwich's "shewings." He's not alone.

Holy shit they interviewed this kid's mom and wow. Yeah she's just. Refusing to actually validate anything her son has said to her. "I can't describe to you the feeling that it gives you when your son says to you, 'Can't you feel it, God is everywhere...' But I told him, 'You don't see God until you die!'" Your son is saying the same shit mystics have said throughout history, lady; and he's expressing himself very clearly for a teenager. I'm not going to quote all the bullshit she says but she clearly just has a very sensitive son who had anxiety, and LSD gave him a sense of wonder at the universe, and she thinks that means he's crazy. (She does mention that drug use should be a medical issue and not a criminal one, so points to her for that; but based on what they showed, her son shouldn't have been locked up.)

They also interview a teenage girl who is there after multiple suicide attempts. She was on LSD when the people she was with sexually assaulted her, and shortly after she first attempted suicide. And again they interview the mom...who describes a textbook case of major depression after a traumatic event: "She lost interest in herself, she was very lethargic. She didn't want to do anything, even things she used to do." The girl attempted suicide two more times. Mom is trying to do the right thing, here. But again, this wasn't the fault of LSD?? It's the fault of the people who assaulted her?

God, this is heartbreaking: "When I found out, I didn't know what to say. And she asked me, 'Are you angry at me?' and I said, 'Why would I be angry [at you]?' I just didn't think this would happen. I wanted something better for her." ;_;

They bring on some doctor of neuropsychiatry who says absolute word vomit ("This is really a very serious malignant form of modern civilization which means that we no longer have the stamina to really hassle with our youngsters in a purposeful way of learning," and he keeps going! Sir, are you DRUNK?)

They go to a crash house run by the Diggers and act like giving homeless kids a place to sleep and food to eat is harming them. But you see this even NOW in cities with high homeless populations--the idea that housing/feeding them is only enabling them. (Don't even get me started that shit it makes me furious.)

They admit the hippie movement sounds real attractive to young people and openly list the reasons: "The way they dress, the way they advocate love as opposed to hate, peace as opposed to war, self expression as opposed to inhibition. All these things put them in the role of courageous and warm-hearted rebels against cold stiff square old-fashioned authority." I mean. Yeah????? I know people hate on boomers a lot, but for real, they were rebelling against pretty hardcore "conform or die" messaging from the 50's, plus the Vietnam War.

"Doctors see a universal danger in use of LSD: they feel that normally rebellious young people may be turned into emotional cripples. At a time when they should be meeting and solving problems of sexuality and personal identity, they deaden their drives with a magic pill which solves nothing. They may never grow up." This is at least half "suffering is good for you" rhetoric. Also by "sexuality" they don't mean "figure out if I'm gay" lol they mean "realize you might want sex, and therefore get married and have children."

The talk to a few people at one of the Digger crash houses. One of them is like, "I like it here. I have my own room and I cook food for everyone." She literally just....found a sense of meaning by helping people out and being around people with the same ideals as her. This is not a bad thing.

BAAAHAHAHAHA THEY GO TO THE GRATEFUL DEAD HOUSE

They admit plenty of the hippies are hard workers trying to create a better world--but because that better world is at least partially inspired by their experiences on LSD, those ideas are completely dismissed.

Look at this BABY-FACED JERRY GARCIA

Anyway the members of the Grateful Dead talk about how they do want a more peaceful world and a simple life (hahhhhh) and that, yes, most people decide to be hippies after doing LSD, but that plenty of people do it a few times and stop, because they've learned what LSD had to teach them.

They show people at a rock show, dunno where, but there's a liquid light show projected onto the stage and people are dancing, and ironically this is SUPER useful for my gd fic because I couldn't find any CROWD SHOTS from the original Fillmore or Avalon! Anyway apparently said theaters didn't sell alcohol, useful to know.

More scare-mongering about bad trips--which they admit could be brought on by being hungry and sleeping outside. (but giving them a warm place to sleep and food to eat is bad??)

OH HEY they talk about the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic. (I looked it up and TIL: They didn't close until 2019.)

Some discussion of how other drugs were starting to come onto the scene--and they show a guy slumped over on the couch at the clinic. (On a related note: for real, heroin is bad. Like the anti-drug people are actually right on that one. Don't do heroin.)

The guy who started the clinic said that a lot of the older doctors who volunteer there, themselves have kids who are hippies. So there's this need to understand their kids better and a drive to help people like their own children. "The attitude [towards hippies who need healthcare] of 'let them die' changes when it's their own kid." Yeah I bet it does.

More from the guy who started the clinic: "One thing that people don't realize is that the Haight-Ashbury is a symptom, not a cause. And that the kids are attracted to the Haight-Ashbury because of some deprivation, primarily intellectual deprivation, in their former mode of life. And I think this is why [kids from] the middle class are so intensely involved in the Haight-Ashbury: because it is a product of the middle class. It's not a peripheral movement, it is a direct reaction against the forces that control the United States. And it's not an anarchist movement*, the hippies aren't interested in any philosophy, including communism! They just want to live their own life."

(*Some of the Diggers might disagree on that one lol)

Back to Harry Reasoner: "The way the hippies want to live seems in the end to consist of childish postures. They claim they want to be left alone, but they are masters at setting up public occasions which are bound to draw attention if not interference. Just as an unruly child will act up in a way that attracts adult intervention, and then complain about it." LOLOL this is literally just "they're having fun in public and it's not to my tastes, so I don't like it." Like their example is a band playing on a fire escape and people on the street dancing. That's Wholesome, my dude; you just don't like the music or the kind of dancing. But they BLOCKED TRAFFIC OH NOES. The cops show up, the band stops, the crowd starts singing "God Bless America" at the cops, lolol. Oh and then the Grateful Dead announce they're gonna play in the Panhandle, so the crowd wanders off. The Dead then play Dancing in the Street, which even Harry Reasoner admits is funny.

"They object to the ills which beset society: social hatreds, money-grubbing, spiritual waste. But their remedy is to withdraw into private satisfactions." ....okay he's not entirely wrong there. Like, it's difficult to talk about hippies as this monolithic group that all want one thing, because that absolutely was not true. But for plenty of them, the goal was just to have a good time.

Finally, he lays out his theses:

"You can say three things about them. They, at their best, are trying for a kind of group sainthood. And saints running in groups are likely to be ludicrous. They depend on hallucination for their philosophy. This is not a new idea and it has never worked. And finally they offer a spurious attraction of the young: a corruption of the idea of innocence. Nothing in the world is as appealing as real innocence. But it is by definition a quality of childhood. People who can grow beards and make love are supposed to move from innocence to wisdom."

I.....what does that mean. Why are saints in groups "ludicrious." When was it tried before that didn't work. How the fuck does this guy define innocence and wisdom and why are they mutually incompatible??

And boy oh boy would he hate to find out that a very common idea among these people's kids/grandkids is going to be "I'm allowed childish pleasures and whimsy, as long as I pay my bills etc., if they make me happy and I'm not hurting anyone." Like, I watched this thing because I'm writing fanfiction about a cartoon (theoretically) aimed at children. Daci is downstairs playing a video game. This house has dozens of stuffed animals in it. We go to comic conventions.

Harry Reasoner would be so mad at us for doing all that stuff, instead of doing the marriage/kids/house in the suburbs thing ahahahhaaaaa

In this case, sir, the hippies won. Sorry.

#the hippie temptation #1960's #haight ashbury #my posts #april writes #<-bc it's for my fic #Youtube

7 notes · View notes