Summer of love

This year is the 40th anniversary of the "summer of love". There's an exhibit commemorating it at the Whitney Museum of American Art and that exhibit was reviewed in today's NY Times (and so continues my on-going conversation with the Times).

The review was more of a comment on the time period than the art itself (as are most articles about anything to come out of that decade), saying that the show, titled "Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era", is missing some of the harder edge of the 60s, that it, "remembers a lot, but forgets much more, about what was happening 40 years ago, when America was losing its mind to save, some would say, its soul". I, clearly, haven't seen this art exhibit and wasn't around for the summer of love, but I'm not sure this reviewer has quite gotten the point. The reviewer goes on to say, "The decade was the furthest thing from laid back. It was wired, confused and confusing, with constant clashes around race, class, gender and politics, idealism and ideology" and continues describing in detail what a hard and trying time period in American (and world) history the 60's, or more precisely 1963-1972, were.

The article is a whole can of (contradictory) worms that I don't really want to get into but the gist (or one of the dueling gists) was that the summer of love vibe got, rightfully, beaten out of people, that, "we discover in 40-year retrospect, love was never all you needed". That sentiment is followed closely by, "Young people are by definition narcissistic, all clammy ego. They want what they want. There is no past that matters; the future isn't yet real", and ultimately that there should be another 60s show that "makes the 'Summer of Love' what it really was: a brief interlude in a decade-long winter of creative discontent". Not surprisingly, I don't really buy any of that. I mean I get that some hard and horrible things happened both domestically and internationally during the 60s that disillusioned a lot of people, but suppose more people had been able to hold on to the idea that "all you need is love", even when faced with the most horrible things the world has to offer (My Lai massacre to use an example from this article)? Would holding onto that feeling, that, summer of love, flower power feeling, be such a bad thing?

I wrote a couple days ago about not wanting to see images of war on the front page of the paper. The reason I don't want to see it is because, this reviewer is right, seeing horrible things makes it harder to hold onto the love (so to speak), but that's the test of the human experience isn't it, to hold on to the positive even when faced with overwhelming negativity? What I'm getting at here is faith really. When the world starts looking, just, evil do you give up on it? Or do you move forward? Maybe you have faith in God and when you reach your breaking point you pray and that faith, the belief that someone or something bigger is there, gets you through it. Maybe your faith is in yourself and your "prayers" are directed inward to let yourself know that you are strong enough to handle whatever you have to. Maybe you have faith in karma and believe that the evil in the world will get what's coming to it. Or Maybe, like Bono and the flower children of the 60s, you believe in love. So, I'm getting a wallow-in-the-horror-and-fear-and-discontent vibe from this article and I say, whatever it is that you have faith in, hold on to that and try to let go of the rest.

Next time I'll bring you fun with the federal budget: minimum wage increase and war funding.