While Andrew Ferguson recently explored the darkness at the heart of the so-called Summer of Love, NPR is in full spate, gushing over the awesomeness of the fiftieth anniversary of the summer of the hippie.  Here's the signoff from a July 1 NPR piece:

Fifty years later, the San Francisco hippie with flowers in her hair is an enduring American archetype - a sweet reminder of the time when baby boomers were young and optimistic. They believed they could change the world, and they did. For NPR News, I'm Rachael Myrow in San Francisco.

On July 22, NPR broadcast a segment from PRI, warbling about the halcyon days of 1967:

Dennis McNally, former publicist for the Grateful Dead and a historian of the Summer of Love, said the cultural life of America was fermenting in said [sic] Haight-Ashbury in 1966. "They experimented with psychedelics, with consciousness, with sexuality, with music, with all kinds of things." ...

School was out, and the idea of being part of something exciting, radical and fun drew as many as 100,000 people to the streets of Haight-Ashbury that summer … Joel Selvin, a writer and former rock critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, said "San Francisco was this glorious beacon of this new life and it echoed throughout the world."

There you have it: cultural fermentation, excitement, radical fun, a glorious beacon echoing throughout the world (incidentally, how does a beacon echo?).  But what's to criticize?  After all, Mr. McNally is "a historian of the Summer of Love," so it must be so.

Let's look a little deeper at the aftermath of that exciting, radical, and fun summer.  Consider one of Mr. McNally's former clients, Jerry Garcia, dead at 53, obese, diabetic, strung out on heroin and cocaine.  Consider Jimi, Janis, and Jim, all dead at 27 from drug overdoses.  And those are the success stories: they died rich, if not happy.

What about the many unknown victims of that exciting, radical, and fun summer?  Their number is legion.  Consider one of my classmates.  Dan began taking drugs in high school and never looked back, ending up an alcoholic.  As his sister put it, "Dan died alone in a pool of his own blood. Please don't write to me again."  Quite an epitaph, not quite "a sweet reminder of the time when baby boomers were young and optimistic."

Or my sister, just turned 70 and still struggling to recover – physically, emotionally, and spiritually – from the Summer of Love.  Years ago, she told me of a party her friends went to.  They all sat in a circle on the floor while their dealer provided free dope.  Far out, man!  Everyone got real mellow – until the dealer came up behind one of the partiers and beat the crap out of him.  He owed the Man money.  Everyone's trip turned into a bummer.  Such stories could be multiplied in their tens of thousands.

Yes, "the cultural life of America was fermenting" while the Diggers were trying to "create a new economy without money," but that goes only so far.  You can liberate your food from the dumpster behind Safeway, and you can crash in an abandoned building, but your dealer demands cash up front, man.  Good old American greenbacks.  It doesn't get any more uptight and bourgeois than that, but hey, we all have to make compromises.

NPR, you owe your listeners just a peek at the dark side of the Summer of Love, at the homelessness, venereal disease, overdoses, assaults, and homicides that marked that "glorious beacon of this new life" – sad "reminders of the time when baby boomers were young and optimistic."

Henry Percy is the nom de guerre of a writer in Arizona.  He may be reached at saler.50d[at]gmail.com.