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Wait... the Summer of Love is officially over? And we're just finding out about it now?!
Tuesday's LA Times featured a piece titled "There's not a lot of love in the Haight" focusing on the street kids and drug addicts that populate San Francisco's famed Haight-Ashbury district.
The scoop? Although Jerry Garcia used to drop acid in the Haight, "the legions of idealistic wanderers who migrated here during the Vietnam War" have been replaced by homeless drug addicts, and the current residents of the Haight (some of them aging former hippies) are frightened because they've "never seen anything like this crowd."
It's undoubtedly true, but it aint news. Gutter punks dominating the Haight have been around at least a decade and a half. Longer, I'm sure. Back when I was a sheltered, suburban Bay Area teen making periodic trips into the city to troll Haight's vintage clothing stores and record shops, there were tons of street kids around.
I went to a lot of punk rock shows and met plenty of kids like these. My stepbrother was one of them. Weeding out the fashion punks -- the middle-class kids who sport the mohawks and torn up clothes but live in decent homes -- a good chunk of these people, as this article points out, are homeless, drug-addicted street kids who come from troubled homes. This has little to do with "rebellious punks trampling the free love hippie aesthetic" or even "former hippies becoming tools of the establishment." The real narrative here -- and it is told the world over, throughout time, I am convinced -- is about how disenfranchised people who have no stake in society are treated as worthless and in turn often treat the society around them that way.
Here's another thing most former hippies will never acknowledge: "the hippie revolution" although it indicated a dramatic shift in certain societal values was NOT a universal experience. It was a set of socially organized choices that were most readily available to people of a certain socio-economic status (read: middle class). Fast forward a couple of decades and turn that same lens on punk music, which in this country has always been a predominantly white, middle-class thing. One could draw a number of interesting parallels between the two genres.
As for street kids and "gutter punks," we have plenty of our own right here in Los Angeles. But maybe homegrown human misery isn't as piquant as the San Francisco variety.
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I lived in the Haight for almost a decade (until 2001) and post-Mayor Jordan (aka the Willie Brown years) the number of hooligans in the neighborhood skyrocketed. These kids were shitting in my driveway, fucking on the porch, huffing paint on the sidewalk, dealing drugs in plain view on the corner, and attacking residents with chains/knives/bottles as they walked home from the N Judah stop near the Kezar Club. Whenever cold or wet weather rolled in this population was diminished by at least 80% as the vast majority went back home to the 'burbs. Easy access to free food and services from misguided aging hippies is a big reason why these kids hung around. There's a good reason why you don't feed pigeons and other vermin - it encourages them to hang around and reproduce.
I lived in the Haight for almost a decade (until 2001) and post-Mayor Jordan (aka the Willie Brown years) the number of hooligans in the neighborhood skyrocketed. These kids were shitting in my driveway, fucking on the porch, huffing paint on the sidewalk, dealing drugs in plain view on the corner, and attacking residents with chains/knives/bottles as they walked home from the N Judah stop near the Kezar Club. Whenever cold or wet weather rolled in this population was diminished by at least 80% as the vast majority went back home to the 'burbs. Easy access to free food and services from misguided aging hippies is a big reason why these kids hung around. There's a good reason why you don't feed pigeons and other vermin - it encourages them to hang around and reproduce.
I'm not surprised. I've encountered kids like this everywhere. Being young myself, I have a different perspective. Nevertheless, these kids aren't doing what they're doing because they're neglected, it's because they're losers. Homeless and drug addicts? Give me a break. These were the private school kids who ran away and did too much heroin to return home. They didn't grow up in the ghetto. I'm not going to have pity on some kid who was too stupid to know what was up. They aren't like this because society neglected them, they are like this because they have forsaken society.
There is the same thing going on in Italy. Punkabustas. Dirty ass kids, long hair, big dogs with them. They look like what you would expect humans to look like after a nuclear war - dressed with whatever piece of clothing they could find, it looks like. All they do is call ruckus, they smell like shit. Things like that aren't necessary in Italy - it's practically a welfare state. Nevertheless, they're mad at the world and they think the rest of the world should be, too.
You got one thing right: the only ones who can afford to do this shit are middle-class white kids.
the photo was taken at venice beach