Daily blog: It’s May 10th, 2021.
I blame it on the hippies. As a child of the sixties, I saw the fun and sun Beach Boys sound give way to the psychedelic bands of the ’70s.
My life during those years resembled Beaver’s in the TV series “Leave It To Beaver.” I could run, play, and do as I please as long as I was home by dark. Space launches were still big events, and superheroes could defeat the enemy by themselves or at most with a sidekick.
Then the images of war started showing up on TV, and I became one of the first kids to ever watch its carnage on the nightly news.
Yes, the times, they were a-changin, and The Merry Pranksters were traveling across the country in their multi-colored school bus, handing out LSD and the message of “free” to all who would listen.
From Monterey to Woodstock, it was now cool to drop out and drop into the drug scene. And it was this free love anything-goes ideology that has taken us to where we are now.
Having said that, I must say the hippies did usher in a lot of good things, good people, and good ideas. But the idea one can live free on the streets and do drugs their entire life was not one of them.
Nothing is free; someone had to build the roads and infrastructure that today’s counterculture wrongly believes they have a right to, along with your hard-earned tax dollars, which most feed themselves with.
Yep, those friendly hippies like to look back fondly at the world they created, but most never take responsibility for the mess we see on our streets today. And while there is nothing wrong with a good party, at some point in life, you have to grow up and play the role of a parent, to be the square, for without them you would have no free country to live in.
Timothy French 