Piddingworth Greg Benton |
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| 'Piddingworth...where St. George's Cross is not yet banned.' Mark Steyn |
| THE SUMMER OF 'LOVE' - FORTY YEARS ON |
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| Chilling out in my friend's MGB - the summer of 1967 |
| 1967. The 'Summer of Love' Like, all you need is love, man....and we're being reminded of it forty years on. 'We're a new generation, with a new explanation', exclaimed Scott MacKenzie in his big 1967 hit, 'If you're going to San Francisco...be sure to put a flower in your hair'. Actually, it was more like: be sure to take your birth control pills there as you roll around on the street, half-naked and stoned out of your mind, getting 'laid' by somebody who hasn't had a bath in months. Like, wow. The usual icon of the sixties is that of the unpopular war in Viet Nam that was, I believe, finally won by Al Gore, but the most significant and real paradigmatic change came with the introduction of 'The Pill'. It is the birth control 'pill' that symbolises the first principle of the 'new explanation': Choice without responsibility. This is reflected, not only in the enormous sexual immorality that has become the 'norm', but in the manner and regard for the relationship between oneself and oneself; one's boy/girlfriend, husband/wife, family, parents, friends, one's country, the law, nature, the world life....and the 'God', formerly known as 'God', now known as 'Me'. It's a narcissistic blush. Any and all things are primordially subject to the useful pleasure of the self and, when they no longer serve that purpose, they become 'disposable'; even little unborn children in their mother's womb. The new explanation for 'life' is to kill it if it is inconvenient; a portent that might well come back to haunt the generation of love with the current popularity of euthanasia as a means of disposing of the 'useless, sick, old people' who don't contribute to the economy and are just a drag on the lifestyles of their little 'Rhodas' The summer of love is perpetuated in just about every place and remains largely an insatiable lust for pleasure that even Bacchus would envy. There is more 'dope', lingering in the brains or otherwise active, in the dopiness of many of our political, social, religious, and judicial elites whose devotion to self-pleasing emotion in all things has resulted in a culture permeating with an estrangement from objective truth, virtue, duty, justice and just basic decency. Now, the confused, entitled, and materialistic offspring and offspring's offspring they produced, having been taught that what was wrong is now right and what was bad is now good, and uncertain of the 'boundaries', are 'acting out' the consequences of the moral and intellectual bankruptcy in which they have been formed. The generation that rejected 'Daddy' is still living off of 'Daddy's money'... i.e., whatever he left in his will, but it's summer of 'love' will soon become it's winter. To those of that generation who have withstood the flood of change, may your children and children's children shine out for you and the restoration of what the Mummys and Daddys of old struggled to achieve and pass on. |