Summer of Love Part II? Maybe Not

I was 5 years old during the Summer of Love. I didn't know it was the summer of love. For me, 1967 was the summer of learning how to ride a two-wheel bike and catch a baseball. I didn't know where San Francisco was or that there was a war in Vietnam. I always felt like I kind of missed out on something, by being around during the Summer of Love, but too little to have any idea of what was going on.

This might be part of the reason why The Occupiers have been so interesting to me. While they are literally a poor-man's version of the hippie revolution of 1967, I guess they are the closest thing we have today to counter-culture. I thought maybe the Occupy Movement had enough cachet, enough backbone, and enough conviction to become relevant and recreate some of the social awareness of the Summer of Love. I am a big enough person to admit when I am wrong. I wouldn't insult the Summer of Love by comparing the Occupy movement with it.

There is no more trite cliche than "you can never go back home"...I guess it could be extended to say you can never go back to 1967 either...no matter how filthy you look or how badly you smell. I was in Boston on business a few weeks ago and made it a point to visit "Occupy Boston". What a letdown. Occupy Boston was essentially city of tents that should have been put in the dumpster back in 1967. I don't know if Philip Morris is the official sponsor of the Occupy movement, but when I went to visit it was mostly a bunch of folks who needed a shower standing around bumming smokes from each other. Maybe they were on a break or something, but there wasn't a lot of protesting going on. No chants, no drums, no human microphone speeches. The only activity was a couple of occupiers making a sign letting people know that they needed donations of blankets, coats, socks, men's & women's underwear. I noticed they left soap off the list. I thought about asking if they forgot about toiletries in general, but I was wearing a suit and tie that day and presumed that they probably weren't that interested in hearing my suggestions. They probably should have added cigarettes to the list too, because they looked like they were running low, but again, I didn't want to seem like a butt-insky. In addition to the signs asking for donations of things they needed, there were lots of other signs making ridiculous statements or suggestions like "People before profits" "no electoral college" "tax the greedy, feed the needy" "We have jobs, we need revolution" They have jobs? really? I didn't know camping out in Boston was a job. A little solid advice for them...if they want to keep that job they better quit hanging around smoking cigarettes and get back to work. There were some clearly self-serving signs like "Outlaw Student Debt"...I wonder who wrote that one.

I was really disappointed in the occupiers I saw. Maybe, like the Redsox of old, the Boston Occupiers are just lousy occupiers...the cellar dwellers of the occupy movement. However, I also spent a fair amount of time on the OWS website reading and chatting with occupiers on their forum. Again, major disappointment. Rational ideas and realistic solutions are absent from the OWS debate, pushed aside by calls for a ban on currency and a return to essentially a barter economy. Really? Barter economy? That's how we are going to get out of the nation's financial mess?

Whether they know it or not, the occupiers have some legitimate gripes. The government is out of control. The cozy relationships between Wall Street and Washington are an abomination of our treasured capitalist system. Crony capitalism looks after the fat cats often to the detriment of those trying to work their way up the ladder. What is their solution? Asking for handouts, demanding that debt be illegal, and accusing George Bush of planning 9/11 are not solutions. They are lunacy. Also, camping on private or municipal property making a nuisance of oneself is no way to make an impact on society. I know the occupiers hate leadership and any sense of authority through a hierarchy, but if they want anyone to take them seriously, they need leadership, they need a message, and they need an agenda. Absent any of these they are just smelly loiterers who are running low on smokes. I doubt there are many five year old kids today who are going to look back and feel like they missed something because they were too young to be an occupier.