Ira Chernus at Tom Dispatch reviews the De Young Museum’s 50th anniversary commemoration of the Summer of Love, and revisits what it was all really about:
“Perhaps it’s time to take a retrospective look at that Summer of Love moment, half a century ago, and reacquaint ourselves with the two kinds of radicalism of the time, one promoting a more humane idea of security and the other aimed at building a new kind of life that transcended the question of security altogether. Perhaps between them they might spark some truly new thinking about how to respond to the power and dominance of our national security state and to a way of life that shuts us down, locks us in, ratchets up our terrors, and offers us a vision of more of the same until the end of time.”