The documentary I saw on the hippies and the 60′s scene in the Haight Ashbury district of San Fran seemed very fair and comprehensive. Something in me responded to the naivete, innocence and optimism of the original (real) hippies, and to their sadness when they later reflected on it all crashing down.

Of course, I also noticed that they couldn’t connect the dots, couldn’t accept that some semblance of order is necessary; or that the predators’ arrival – thus totally tipping the scales – was inevitable, that it was just a question of WHEN they would arrive.

That if you want to be sheep, make sure the sheepdogs surround you and are themselves well taken care of and know that you honor them in their role of protecting you from the wolves, so that you can comfortably wrap yourself inside your Dream.

Perhaps that’s why I, unlike my husband, reacted so negatively to what I saw in Golden Gate Park today. For me, it wasn’t a bunch of happy people getting in touch with their inner child, with the leavening of a few random perverts. Instead, it was the same ugly slippery slope I remember from almost 40 years ago, when the little moments of color and beauty degenerated into something unutterably foul.

So, you were OK with the five minute head start for the womenfolk?

I’m mindful of what happened to the real hippies of Haight-Ashbury once their movement took off. What was once, in the early to mid 60′s a relatively small group of free-love, free-thought experimenters turned into something else just a few short years later. 50,000 homeless, drug-addicted teenagers and young adults, penniless, thronged in and were immediately lost on the streets, with disease and a host of other problems quickly mounting. At first free-love and free-drug parties reigned peacefully, but then the free-drug scene died as pushers moved in with determined great violence to rule these defenseless (by choice) children and adult children. It wasn’t long after that when the original hippie community organizers declared, in a march, that the scene was dead, the entire dream was dead, time for everyone to simply go. The alternative lifestyle experiment succeeded and then it failed. Kudos to them for realizing what had happened.

Now, San Francisco isn’t collapsing as quickly, but it’s clear that it is collapsing. I wonder if the originators of the current city movements are taking a look around and not liking what they’re seeing. Perhaps because it is a city and not a neighborhood, it won’t be so easy to declare a dream over once the dream has become a nightmare. Somehow I think that this time, the city council and the determined political movers have too much vested in the game, and too little honesty besides, to declare their dream over. I see a horrifying hell-hole not too far in the near future.

Then, just as New York had to experience actual hell on earth before Giuliani, San Francisco will experience its hell. Will there be a Giuliani to emerge to lead the city back from the brink, when that occurs?

No one who imagined the Light that was New York City in the 50′s could imagine the collapsed, bankrupt, decayed, hopeless blight it had become by the late 70′s… nor the amazing turnaround to be seen everywhere by the year 2000. Those who love San Francisco, such as Danny, will be shocked at what they’ll find there in ten years (or perhaps at what they’ll find even now, if they’ve not been there in a while). But certainly I give it no more than ten years. Then we will see if there will ever be a renaissance for the once uniquely beautiful city.