Berkeley Daze

 Berkeley. And the constant sound of drums and the lilting music of flutes like Pan’s or something out of the Amazon jungle that were carried along on the breeze with the wafting smell of marijuana and Mexican hash as you crossed the campus. And everyone’s favorite TV show being “Laugh In.” And the whole thing being like some amazing, dream-like, too often schizophrenic “trip.” And “hippies,” whoever they were, being gentle flower children who meant no harm to anyone and who just wanted to play and listen to their music and decorate themselves in colors and clothes (or not) of the wild abandon of flowers, and smoke their dope, and make love. The media called it, “tuning in and dropping out.” And Timothy Leary was alive. Before it all turned bad. And ugly. And acid replaced cannabis. And then heroin. And people died, both the most innocent, and the most politically promising. One or two who preached non-violence, and love.

 Berkeley. Before we all got older. And graduated (or not). And had kids. And had to make a living to support what suddenly appeared as our children from women (or men) who suddenly became our “wives” or “husbands.” And “The War” ended. And the Panthers got older and went to jail on the same buses the draftees were taken on to go to Yerba Buena for involuntary induction into the Vietnam era army… And Dylan disappeared along with Peter, Paul & Mary. And Joan Baez. And we all got older and found that we had responsibilities (“ready or not, here they come!”). And became co-opted by the drone World. And things calmed down. And we gave rise to Generation “X.” And they weren’t the perfect children we’d dreamed of having, and raising, as a part of Woodstock Nation.

 Berkeley.

 But was I a “hippie”? I’m more one of them in some ways now, I think, now that I’ve grown up and know my way around the place better, and have more self-confidence than I had then.

  “History” may be more certain, but only because it is more callous in its appraisal.

 I’m just as confused about much of it today as I was then. (And don’t let them kid you, that’s what we WERE: confused, and scared, and young.)

 It was the media’s need to interpret what we did as conscious and intelligent that made so much of it seem intentional.

 To this day I still don’t know who I was then, or where it was all going, or what it was all about.

 None of us did.

 And don’t let anyone tell you differently.

September 1967 to January 1970, Berkeley, California (@, by Eliot Freeman, and as published non-exclusively by “Common Ties”, February, 2008)