The tumultuous years of the 1960s were a time of substantial rejection of the moral and cultural standards of previous generations by the young people of the day. Thus, “the Sixties” has been called the “Counterculture Era.” The Counterculture Era, generally from 1960 through 1975, was characterized by social upheaval—the rejection of parental and governmental authority, the establishment of radical…

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Cultural revolutionaries wanted to overturn or transcend dominant American values and morals and develop a higher consciousness. They sought to do this through a process called “deconditioning,” which they thought would result in the jettisoning of the social conditioning received from the previous generations and in its place create a new, superior social order. (Braunsten and Doyle, p. 15.) The…

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The Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco was the LSD phenomenon’s epicenter with such “accoutrements of the acid flash as tie-dyed clothes, strobe lights and psychedelic posters.” (Farber, p. 36.) LSD philosophers concluded that adults’ perception of their environment was so shuttered, rigid, and one-dimensional that their response to stimuli always followed the same dismal pattern, producing war, injustice, poverty, racism…

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Communes, where hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of young people sought to rebuild the society that they viewed as severely flawed, were a significant part of the 1960s counterculture. The media stereotype consisted of funky architecture, outlandish clothing styles, deviant lifestyles dominated by drug use and free love. (Braunstein and Doyle, Miller, The Sixties-Era Commune, p. 327.) However, reality…

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