15

CREATE A COUNTERCULTURE

Dread fills the air we breathe. The apocalyptic wildfires that spread throughout California in 2020 and color the San Francisco skyline orange, after bone-dry conditions, spur feelings of climate grief, because the planet’s warming temperatures will make it uninhabitable for humans by the end of the century. College students no longer assume when they graduate that they’ll have a solid career that will take them into retirement. They wonder if they’ll find enough gig work to offset the massive student debt they have accrued to pay for their education. The escalating use of surveillance capitalism makes the right to privacy seem like a relic of a distant era. One wonders whether dissent is the next casualty in our dystopian future.

Dread isn’t new. It’s as American as the crises to which it’s a response. Every generation battles the fear of total annihilation. The solution isn’t to take a Pollyannaish attitude, to say that everything, ultimately, will be okay if we wait it out. It’s to create a counterculture opposed to what’s corrosive in the mainstream. A culture of values that diminish the flames of exploitation.

This is what American youth did in the 1960s in a moment, like ours, defined by social upheaval. The Vietnam War left thousands of Americans and millions of Vietnamese dead. After the nationally televised draft lottery, organized by the Nixon administration, on December 1, 1969, there seemed to be little optimism for an end in sight. There was also the new postwar capitalism, symbolized by a traditional middle-class family that lived in places like a lily-white suburb of Poughkeepsie. Men in suits headed to their corporate jobs at advertising agencies on Madison Avenue. Women stayed home to care for the kids. On a positive note, the Black freedom struggle, then in its second decade, was finally adding political victories with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But if white people barely tolerated the nonviolent civil disobedience of a Martin Luther King in Birmingham, Alabama, in the face of segregationist sheriffs in June 1963, they were petrified of the increasing militancy of activists like Huey Newton and the Black Panther Party’s rhetoric of self-defense in Oakland, California, in 1966.

In these turbulent times, American youth faced a stark choice: follow in their parents’ footsteps or opt out and make their own path. The first choice was comfortable, the second alienating. But alienation is lessened by love. So they formed a beloved community. San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district was the locus of the Summer of Love of 1967, which saw one hundred thousand hippies flock to the city’s parks.

The writings of the 1950s Beat Generation were their spiritual guide. Being beaten down by society can be a rallying cry for revolution. In between classes on college campuses across the nation, lying on grassy campuses before class, students read out loud the elegiac poetry of their disheveled, bespectacled Jesus, Allen Ginsberg. In coffee shops and dive bars on New York City’s Bleecker Street, they memorized passages from On the Road, by Ginsberg’s Columbia University friend and classmate Jack Kerouac. They wanted to get lost and not found. Life, they believed, should be a psychedelic trip of cut-ups—with beginnings, middles, and ends out of order. This was the stream-of-consciousness style pioneered by William S. Burroughs, most notably in his novel Naked Lunch (1959).

American culture needs to be reformed. This, at least, is what attendees of the 1967 Human Be-In at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park believed. They wore handmade tie-dye shirts and bell-bottom pants. Men and women grew out their hair. They performed avant-garde folk and psychedelic rock. Ate vegetarian and practiced yoga. And chanted “Make Love, Not War!”

Irreverence against authority wasn’t only evident in the counterculture’s style; it was part of their politics. The best example is the Diggers. Formed in 1966, they gave away free food to the unsheltered every afternoon at the Fell Street Panhandle in San Francisco. They later expanded their mutual aid to include free bus rides, clothing, housing, medical care, and legal services. Beyond this direct work, the Diggers had an impact upon the Yippies (members of the Youth International Party), which was officially founded by the prankster Abbie Hoffman on New Year’s Eve 1967 and combined guerrilla street theater and political satire to attack symbols of American power. Hoffman is best remembered for, along with twenty co-conspirators, dropping a hundred dollar bills from the balcony of the New York Stock Exchange on August 24, 1967. They watched with delight when the male brokers stopped their trading on a dime to catch as many bills as possible as they slowly floated toward the exchange floor. Hoffman’s goal, “the death of money,” was as important for drawing media attention as it was for infusing a sense of playfulness into the antiwar movement. Up until that point, the movement was no fun. It was solemn as ever—with almost five hundred thousand US soldiers deployed in Vietnam, and many more to come.

Shortly after this prank, Hoffman, along with Allen Ginsberg, organized another one: a march of thousands to levitate and exorcise the Pentagon of evil, on October 21, 1967. This came just days after the bloody Battle of Ong Thanh, in which sixty-four Americans were killed. Hoffman wasn’t done. His most memorable act came during the Democratic National Convention in August 1968, months after Martin Luther King was gunned down in Memphis and presumptive Democratic presidential candidate, Bobby Kennedy, met the same fate in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. In Grant Park in Chicago, Hoffman and the Yippies, despite being denied a protest permit by Mayor Richard Daley, nominated a mock 145-pound pig (Pigasus) for president. Humor can be disarming, welcoming in bystanders, telling them that activism can be joyful. But not all will be amused. Chicago police at Grant Park were disgusted and increasingly grew impatient. Then things turned ugly when a man at the protest lowered an American flag on a flagpole. On August 28, after a tense back-and-forth of shouting with Chicago police, hundreds were beaten and gassed—all of it caught on camera and broadcast. Hoffman and six more, together known as the Chicago Seven, were indicted for inciting a riot. During the trial, in September 1969, Hoffman did what he was good at: making a mockery of vaunted institutions. He showed up in black judicial robes, underneath which was a Chicago police uniform. He read poetry and chanted Hare Krishna devotionals, for which he—along with the others—was charged with contempt of the court. For this, he was given a two-year prison sentence, which, upon appeal, was overturned in 1970.

Not everyone was amused with Hoffman’s antics. Not middle-class white Americans who saw Hoffman embodying everything wrong with the longhairs. They’d had enough. As part of the so-called silent majority, they put Republican Richard Nixon, and his strongman “law and order” message, into power in 1968. Before long, the US was in the midst of a right-wing reaction against everything Hoffman and the counterculture fought for.

Knowing what happened, you might be tempted to say it wasn’t worth it. But who’s to say that without these spectacles, corporate greed would still be headline news on CBS or part of editorials in the New York Times in the late 1960s? Would young people beyond the major metropolises—in places like Nebraska, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, and Mississippi—still have heated, if not irreparable breaks, with their parents at the dinner table over the future of the nation? Sure, the 1960s were a divisive time. But without the counterculture’s revealing of deep social fault lines just beneath the surface, would there have been the public outcry that ultimately washed Nixon out of office in 1974 after the Watergate scandal and put an end to the Vietnam War in 1975?

Maybe. Who knows? But one thing is for sure. The counterculture fundamentally changed the conversation about what’s worthwhile. And sometimes making a scene on your own terms is the only way to confront paralyzing dread. This makes you feel less alone. You’re part of a community. Your values are represented—not those of your parents. That’s how it should be. It’s your future. Not theirs.