Hippies Decry Lifestyle Choices of Slackers

San Francisco's Haight Ashbury district was the home to counterculture and the hippie movement. The summer of love and great music created there stays with us until today. This was one happening corner:

 

Yet, there are some residents in this area that are none too pleased with the current crop of folks who are plying the streets and acting in the same fashion that the hippies did all those years ago. You can't make this stuff up:

The former flower child was among the legions of idealistic wanderers who migrated here during the Vietnam War to “tune in, turn on and drop out.”

But Evans, who has lived at the same address for 34 years, says he has never seen anything like this crowd, who use his flower bed as a bathroom and sell pot outside his window.

They’re known as gutter punks, these homeless kids with dirty dreadlocks and nose rings, lime-green mohawks and orange spray-painted faces, who panhandle with cardboard signs that riff on their lifestyles. “Please Help Us Get Un-Sober,” one reads. Another: “Please Give Us Weed, Beer or Money.”

Sometimes aggressive, they block sidewalks as they strum guitars or bang on bongos. Gangs of them skateboard down the middle of Haight Street. Some throw used hypodermic needles into a nearby pond they call Hep-C Lake.

Evans, 64, says they should get help, clean up or go home.

Hippies hating slackers and others who now do the same thing that the hippies used to do? Hypocrites you say? Yes, I think that's not far from the truth. These former hippies are more concerned about their real estate values and their neighborhood than the hippie mantra all those years ago.

This is another street view of the area, taken in 2002:

 

As Verum Serum notes, the Man has invaded Hippie-town!