The Death of Psychedelia
As we all know, nothing lasts forever. One of the saddest things in life is when it finally hits you, that it's over. It's like the day after Christmas- you don't know why but all the magic's gone. That's how it was, little by little, the feeling eroded away and life ebbed back to the normal. Many were left with an undefined emptiness, wondering how the void would be filled. For a really nice elegy on the hippie movement see Hunter S. Thompson's "Wave Speech". from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Another good book to read about the rise and inevitable demise of the flower children is The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, by Tom Wolfe.
There's a lot of reasons for the end
The entertainment industry realized they could make money off the youth movement by sucking the general public into the hippie craze. At the outset, hippies were not a popular group and were shunned by the elite. Over time however, they became media sensations tracked by the evening news. They started to be featured on the cover of popular magazines such as Time and Life. Unhip, uncool people were now becoming hippies to be fashionable.
Marketing of perceived psychedelic stuff. The mass marketing of posters, clothing, and other such paraphernalia watered down the aura and in turn attracted all the riff raff, myself included. The well off, well educated suburban kids all disbanded and tried to go on to other things.
Dope and music could only take you so far and deep down everybody knew it. Most pushed it to the edge only to come back unfulfilled. I guess when you're young you think that you've discovered something that no one else in the history of humanity has even imagined before. You think this big awareness is going to go on forever. But eventually it just drops off, and then there's the next generation coming up behind you with the same idea.
The war ended and there wasn't anything that dire to protest against. The people living in the communes realized that they had the same problems as those living outside the communes. It wasn't so great living off the land like the Indians did, and the creature comforts of our materialistic parents didn't seem so bad after all. Die hards turned their righteous anger against other scandals such as Watergate and nuclear/oil energy debacles, but it just wasn't the same. It was much easier to get people worked up into a frenzy over napalm bombs burning the skin off little Indo-Chinese kids.
Charles Manson kind of put the kibosh on the idea that anybody who has long hair, smokes dope, and talks about peace and love is automatically a great guy.
Where'd They go?
Everyone one split up into all manners of professions and occupations. Most went on to lead everyday uneventful lives as salesmen, factory workers, artisans and the like. The true believers became:
Academia: Many were swallowed up into the pseudo utopia of the college campus, a place where you can become a well paid professor with no marketable skill, plus teach meaningless classes under the guise you are actually doing something while lecturing others on their ignorance. This perfectly fits in with the hippie philosophy.
Politicians/Activists: Others tried and are still trying to relive their glory days in some sort of governmental or non profit scheme. Ensconced with superior visions but lacking any real direction, they spend their energy inventing and taking up causes, real or imagined. They justify their vapid existence by convincing themselves that they are "making a difference".
Trapped: An unfortunate few simply became victims of the low class drug culture and wasted away.
But most prefer to keep their awakenings hidden, keeping that little flame alive somewhere in the recesses of the mind. Trying to work within the system and not sell out at the same time, preserving that little vision they once beheld on an altar within their psyche, giving it a special place of honor.
Hunter S. Thompson’s "Wave Speech"
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas there is the "wave speech" that pretty much sums up the whole thing... "Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era— the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run… but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant.… History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of "history" it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time— and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened. My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights— or very early mornings— when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket… booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change)... but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that… There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda.… You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.… And that, I think, was the handle— that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting— on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.… So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back." Johnny Depp does a nice job portraying Thompson in the movie based on the book. The Wave Speech.
