My family moved back to the SF Bay Area in 1965. I was ten, but my older brother and suster were in high school, and my brother was facing the draft. The summer of 1967 we started seeing what were called hippies in San Francsico, mostly in the Haight. My mother’s favorite way to drive into SF took us by Golden Gate Park and through the edge of the Haight to get downtown. It was quite remarkable to see all the yung people about. And, we knew people taht went to the Be-In, and a friend’s brother went to an Acid Test. It was all a lot of fun and being wild and lvoing everyone. But the “hippy scene” was not the same as the anti-war movement or the free speech movement or any protest demonstrations. Hippies in the Hiaght were, if anything, apolitical. And nobody had really heard of SDS until the anti-draft movement started to ramp up in late 1967. And that was in reaction to seeing footage from Vietnam on the nightly news, and Walter Cronkite announcing body counts each week, and LBJ escalating the war. The US added 100,000 troops into Vietnam in 1967, and that started to meet resistance for a war that had no real meaning or justification. One thing that rarely gets mention, but I feel is critical to understanding the late 60s is that the generation born after the start of WWII, the ones of the famous “generation gap”, were raised by families deeply affected by Post Tramatic Stress from the war. That left millions of kids with fathers that were emotionally absent. Listen to Simon and Garfunlkels’ Dangling Conversation or listen to the description of middle class life in Carly Simon’s That’s the Way I Heard It Should Be