Are You Going to San Francisco?

Calling all old and genuine Flower Children - if any of you are still out there and in SL.
Well, you have read the series of Forum threads on sex, prohibitions and moralities. My immediate family were all hippies and I was raised to that highest of standards of free love and liberal thought and attitudes. So I turn to my elders and betters.
The Age of Aquarius is obviously past - but what can SL do to promote a more benevolent and freedom-loving community? How do we erase the fifty years of reactionary attitudes that may actually be stifling this "outpost of progress"?
Speak wise ones. (I am not being sarcastic here)

I promise you the next time I visit San Francisco, probably be in 2009, I swear I will stop by this address, if LL is still there, and personally leave them something to remember me by.

945 Battery Street, San Francisco, CA 94111

LL has become the only thing that I don't love about SF.

In fact, leaving them a token of my affection is motivation enough for another trip.

R

Are there NO ex-flower children out there???

There are probably a few in SL, but for the most part we are their children.

Then what did they teach us - I can't remember, can you? I kinda lost track between The Grateful Dead and Crosby Stills Nash and Young.

We rebelled and became Reagnites.

I lived in VW bus with my hippie mom on the streets of San Fransisco over the summer
of my 5th year in 1970 and Bread Van with 2 younger brothers, my Mom and Stepdad in 1975.
What I remember of that year had very little to do with Free Love but more
about getting robbed by drug addicts and being cramped and peed on by my little brother in middle of the night.
I don't remember getting much encouragement or receiving much in the "Free Love" area
well maybe I did but I was too young to appreciate it, now over 18 I can't find anyone
I would want to share free love with....whatever that means.
Not all the hippies were into Free love or casual sex.
As far as morals I do remember a whole more who felt it was okay to have
sex with kids and I got more sex as kid back then in the 60's and 70's then I ever experienced as adult but it wasn't about me feeling loved or pleased, it felt more like they were using me but yes most of them were hippies.
Strange thing free love or sex still feels the same now at 44 as it did back then except
I can say no and I am not as cute as I was then to them at least for me.
It isn't about love, it about someone being selfish using someone else while being stoned
to get off without caring about what they want and calling it free love and fun right?
But I guess that isn't fun and exciting or what you're look for?

I wasn't in San Francisco and came of age just a few years after the Summer of Love, however I was fairly counter-culture in my way.

One of the main tenets of the movement was that your elders were NOT your betters. They'd already tried things their way - this was something entirely new, we thought - as if sex and drugs were new. It may be up to the younger ones to come up with an entirely new solution now too.

I do believe the freedom to think outside the box (though you never heard that phrase back then) was rather new, but its foundations had been laid over 100 years in the past with Henry David Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience" and other works. The thing is - the hippie era was not all peace and love. People were killed because they were different. Neil Young talks about getting sent to jail and beaten simply for having long hair and exchanging words with policemen:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TatOkylWcg&feature=related

On a much smaller scale, I was repeatedly pulled over by traffic cops for no reason throughout the 70's and much of the 80's simply for being a guy with long hair. Being part of a revolution took a lot of guts on the part of those who were there first. I merely jumped onto the already crowded bandwagon.

The Utopian dream was not a complete failure. For perhaps the first time in history a war was stopped (or at least one nation's involvement) purely by using flowers, music, and a groundswell of attitude. I like to think it was the arts that caused this groundswell, which is why I support the idea of the creative commons license.

So maybe the younger folks should create some really radical builds, incorporate radical ideas, be willing to share them, [Edit: And be willing to take a few hard knocks for them] and create their own counter culture.

[Wes - you're getting too long winded again. My fingers hurt. -- Your Typist.]

there was a Summer of love, damn how did I miss that?

Honestly, there is no time period for what is being asked for.. the ideals of freedom of both thought and practice, while respecting your fellow sentient being is a the apex of the timeless wont for utopia.

All it takes to get to that place, is to live like you're already there.

Jig, you ask how Second Life can "do to promote a more benevolent and freedom-loving community". I'm not sure if you're referring to the SL community, or the RL community of Earth.. but, i'm going to keep both in mind.

When i first joined SL, it was a much smaller community.. probably only hundreds on at a time. What seems to have changed with time and a vastly growing population is (mainly) the direction of our collective vision. Early on it was a world waiting to be born, with the population weaving it's DNA. Now, it's alive and thriving.. still growing and evolving, but it's out and about.. "seeking it's fortune" as it were.

So, as i say.. "live like you're already there". For Second Life, that means (to me) to encounter this world with ever-lasting wonder and an undying respect for my fellow "sentient beings". Granted, that's my approach to RL as well, but still.. you get the idea.

Oh dear, am I really the only one who remembers how dirty Woodstock was? It was awful.

A lot of it was hype, just marketed in reverse. So much of it was ignorance combined with arrogance - just look at the junk that came out of the SDS... such rubbish. People just digging up every possible kind of outlandish idea, and espousing them all with charismatic confidence... there was so little humility, so much strutting. Only later did we find out that Abby was bipolar...

I was a very, very serious radical for a while back then. I had it all figured out. What I didn't have was a credible model for living a life of intelligent compassion. That being what I needed, I became a nurse (was it really 30 years ago?) As Cybin has said so perfectly, I try to create the results of the revolution every day: a kinder world. I think I've helped a bit. My patients like me )

So, I try to be nice in SL. Doesn't mean I consult the Tarot to do it I read Medscape, and Dickens, and sometimes a little Kerouac, but he really was such an ass... oh, and if people are rude to me? - depending on whether it's worth it, they get it back with interest. Living peacefully doesn't mean being a doormat.

"Highest of standards" LOL! And "free love" cost plenty from what I recall - the gender-different attitudes to sex and relationships have not changed in recorded history; and just because the aphrodisiacal qualities of recreational drugs encouraged more overt physical activity it didn't mean that there wasn't the same post-coital emotional blackmail.

Pep (Like sex in sl - the woman needs a reason, the man just needs somewhere to do it)

I am in San Francisco right now

Wow, this would make an EXCELLENT private sim project. Not that I would have much to contribute except maybe a few hundred or thousand lindens for the build, but what a cool... I mean groovy, idea!

There are a few places in SL that try to recreate the 60's. Flashback Island, Nam 69 - Saigon Bar, and at least one other that is probably gone now, but had painted VW buses and lots of groovy music. All were utterly deserted round the clock as far as I can tell.

I agree it would be great to do a themed community around the Haight-Ashbury 1967 scene. Weed-punk. Californiadreamindon?

/me would drive the hell out of town, go to Big Sur, and visit that lovely nasty Henry Miller...

The "Summer of Love" for me and my family was not about love but contempt. My family was spit upon and demeaned for the things we valued. So I find references to the values of the hippy generation and its "ideals" to be laughable at best.