Tuesday, July 18, 2017

From Summer of Love to Mars (and back?)

Another 2017 anniversary has been noted by several writers and columnists this month: the so-called Summer of Love's 50th. Here's one writer's take on it - Todd Gitlin: Summer of Love and Rage.

Hippie-dom, and Summer of Love were something I only read about, back in England, and, otherwise engaged in my own throes of marriage, separation and frustratingly attempting divorce in an era when it was nowhere near as easy as it is today. I did fleetingly enjoy a few of the LSD-induced songs drifting through my transistor radio, but back then the other side of the Atlantic seemed as far away as Mars - and as alien.

Commenter "Rodmacd", in a thread below the linked piece had this to say:
The hippie era was pretty brief. The Summer of Love, followed 2 years later by Woodstock; thought, with breathless anticipation, to be an "OMG, What's Next?!" event -- and, as we all now know, "next" turned out to be a few years of a whole lot of not much until the hippies traded in their tie-dyes for tie clips and pasted over their "War is not healthy for Children and other living things" bumper stickers with ones that read "He who dies with the most toys wins". Mighty Mammon took a shot or two back then, but it rallied strong and remains the heavyweight champion of the American Dream.


Oh - and speaking of Mars... dragging myself back to 2017 again, here's an interesting piece by Tyler Losier:


The race to the red planet: How NASA, SpaceX are working to get to Mars.




Well then...speaking of space travel, and potential future ways to do it, or aid it: here's another interesting piece, this by Tom Spender:
Teleportation: Photon particles today, humans tomorrow?




As the always quotable and much lamented Sir Terry Pratchett once wrote:
“This is space. It's sometimes called the final frontier. (Except that of course you can't have a final frontier, because there'd be nothing for it to be a frontier to, but as frontiers go, it's pretty penultimate . . .)”
― Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures

2 comments:

Wisewebwoman said...

My firstborn arrived that year. I remember how hopeful we all felt, The US draft dodgers, the protests. The possibility of a new world dawning. And then we all got busy just making a living.

XO
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Twilight said...

Wisewebwoman ~ The 60s had been, for me so far, a decade of mixed blessings, a bit of a roller-coaster ride really. There were valuable lessons learned though! 1967 saw me getting back to a good solid job and more stable lifestyle... for a while anyway.