GROOVY: SUMMER OF LOVE, MESSAGE OF LOVE

High Points

Groovy. It's a word I'll be using all summer long.

It's my way of paying tribute to the 40th anniversary of the Summer of
Love. Yes, it was 40 years ago today that Sgt. Pepper taught the band
to play. Actually, it was 40 years ago last Friday, June 1, 1967, that
the Beatles released "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" in the
U.K., commencing a summer that would change everything.

For those who are too young, or simply choose not to remember, back in
1967 we were in a place not very different in many respects from the
one we are in now. We were engaged in an unpopular war with no way
out; we were less than five years removed from a catastrophic national
nightmare (the Kennedy assassination); and the Middle East was about
to explode in conflict.

But there was also an undercurrent of change that ran strong at that
time. The youth of America were letting their hair down, and many were
listening to the exhortations of Dr. Timothy Leary, who, at the
"Be-In" gathering in San Francisco in January 1967, urged people to
"tune in, turn on and drop out." By that summer, tens of thousands of
young people were headed to San Francisco and, more specifically, the
Haight-Ashbury district, to participate in what they believed would be
a the beginning of a new world order based on love.

The spirit of that summer gathering had been simmering as an American
undercurrent for some time. The basic principles of the youth movement
revolved around communal living, free will, free love, and taking care
of your fellow man. Drugs, specifically marijuana and LSD, were key
components of the new world order, the first because smoking pot was
seen as a act of defiance and the second because its use expanded the
mind. Or, in some cases, blew it. The Grateful Dead, the Jefferson
Airplane and the Quicksilver Messenger Service provided the soundtrack
for the happening.

Fashion, music, sexual mores, how to organize groups and a society,
the mixing of races and genders, technology, the environment, all of
these things were affected by the gathering of the tribes during that
summer. It was a moment in time.

That's not to say that the Summer of Love was, in and of itself, the
focal point of all the change the '60s begat. Rather, to this day, it
serves as a touchstone. The memory of San Francisco in that summer of
'67 reminds us of what power resides in the people when a collective
consciousness for good takes over.

And that's a groovy thing.