This year we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love in San Francisco in 1967. During that auspicious season about 100,000 young Americans traveled west to the Fog City to twist in the gyre of a countercultural hurricane while similar youth movements blossomed in Canada an across Europe. Suspicious of government oppression, aligned against the Vietnam War and consumerist values, the hippies seeking out the Summer of Love embraced sex, art, music, meditation, and the expanded consciousness that could be accessed through drugs and meditation. From this scene a radical value system based on communal values, community care, cultural transformation, and freedom from bourgeois hypocrisy and political tyranny came to light. They were weird, wild, wacked-out, and their impact on the culture has been permanent and lasting despite their many critics and naysayers. Here’s the story of the Summer of Love from PBS’s “American Experience…”

Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more Counter Culture posts.