The Summer of Love and RFK on PBS

Picture: Bay Area 1960's

Last night good viewing on PBS with the 1960's being highlighted. First came The Summer of Love, the story of the Hippie "invasion" of the Haight-Ashbury district during the summer of 1967. Interesting stuff going on right under our noses: we lived in the Bay Area in the mid 60's and did take walks in Berkeley but not San Francisco (though I did work in SF for a short period of time). We were very young and very innocent and still very much interested in doing the things we were supposed to do. Took us a few more years to realize, like the Hippies, that life was more than duty and following the Pope or the President or whomever. Guess we grew up some.

We left the Bay Area in mid summer 1967 and resettled in the Seattle area. It was there on June 5th of 1968 that I watched (on tv) Bobby Kennedy get shot, dying the next day. Jeesh, what a world we had back then, losing RFK and MLK within a few months of each other, JFK five years earlier, and of course all the killing down in SE Asia. PBS did another show on RFK last night, and it too was excellent. Lots of good things came out of the decade of the sixties, all those liberation movements are still bearing fruit; the scientific advances made as a result of the moon mission; all of our kids. Do we have to make periodic sacrifices to unknown gods to advance our cause? to keep the demons from overpowering us? Here's a question for you: are we better off today than we were forty years ago? as a country? as a world? I'm older and wiser in the ways of life, at least when I look at myself as a twenty something and now as a sixty something. Certainly am more reflective and, I would hope, more sensitive to the plight of all these other life forms cohabiting this blue and white orb here in 2007. But our country? our world? I don't know. Lots of bad stuff out there.