The “Summer of Love” Was 53 Years Ago and Now We Have……

…the Summer of Black Lives Matter and Covid-19. What a contrast in visuals – those barefoot, bare breasted and chested, bare faced in 1967 cavorting in San Francisco and elsewhere..

Now, many who are cavorting on beaches and participating in other mass gatherings are likely to be about the same age as those who put the Summer of Love” in the history books “back in the day” but “the look” is not quite the same.

Both groups have some things in common. Here is what Wikipedia has to say:

The Summer of Love was a social phenomenon that occurred during mid-1967, when as many as 100,000 people, mostly young people sporting hippie fashions of dress and behavior, converged in San Francisco‘s neighborhood of Haight-Ashbury.^[1]^[2] More broadly, the Summer of Love encompassed the hippie music, drug, anti-war, and free-love scene throughout the American west coast, and as far away as New York City.^[3]^[4]

Hippies, sometimes called flower children, were an eclectic group. Many were suspicious of the government, rejected consumerist values, and generally opposed the Vietnam War. A few were interested in politics; others were concerned more with art (music, painting, poetry in particular) or spiritual and meditative practices.^[4]

Black Lives Matter (BLM), founded in 2013, is an organized movement advocating for non-violent civil disobedience in protest against incidents of police brutality against African-American people.^[3] An organization known simply as Black Lives Matter^[a] exists as a decentralized network with over 30 chapters in the United States.

The movement returned to national headlines and gained further international attention^[14] during the global George Floyd protests in 2020 following Floyd’s death. An estimated 15 million to 26 million people participated (though not all are “members” of the organization) in the 2020 Black Lives Matters protests in the United States, making Black Lives Matters one of the largest movements in U.S. history.^[15]

And just to complicate things, we have Covid 19.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) was first identified in December 2019 in Wuhan, Hubei, China, and has resulted in an ongoing pandemic.^[10][11] The first confirmed case has been traced back to 17 November 2019 in Hubei.^[12]

No point in adding statistics because they change daily. One thing is certain, masks are becoming a standard item of attire for many of us.