There's not a lot of love in the Haight - Gutter punks roam where, 40 years ago, flower children protested the war in Vietnam. - Los Angeles Times:
"From his second-floor apartment at the counterculture crossing of Haight and Ashbury streets, Arthur Evans watches a new generation of wayward youth invade his free-spirited neighborhood.
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."
...Evans, 64, says they should get help, clean up or go home.
"I used to be a hippie. I wore beads and grew my hair long," he said. "But my generation had something these kids do not: a standard of civilized behavior."
[Okay, this stupidity cannot pass. How does this guy not remember, realize or comprehend that every criticism of the "hippie" culture by the mainstream, during and since, has been that they aren't civilized, they're dirty, anarchic and hedonistic and selfish and spit in the face of "real" civilization. So to say "we had civilized behavior" is the worst kind of lying about the obvious. Denial is powerful. - Rob]
...But a lot of ex-hippies-turned-homeowners are weary of the youthful intruders. They want the Haight to adopt a more mature demeanor, just as they have.
..."I'm sick of stepping over gangs of kids, only to be told 'Die, yuppie!' A lot of us were flower children, but we grew up," said Robert Shadoian, 58, a retired family therapist. "There are responsibilities in this world you have to meet. You can't be drugged out 24/7 and expect the world to take care of you."
...Many are blue-collar misfits fleeing broken homes, sexual abuse, parents with drug and alcohol problems. Some are addicted to crack, heroin and other hard drugs. Proud to live on society's fringes, they rely on a tribal closeness for survival, resisting contact with outsiders.
[But on occasion, good stories come out of it all.]
...Sarah Thibault is a suburban outcast. She was raised in Colorado, where her father went to prison and her mother went on welfare when Sarah was 12.
The straight-A student began ditching school and doing drugs. One day, a boyfriend said, "Let's go to Haight-Ashbury."
"It sounded good. I was idealistic," she said. "I believed the '60s attitude, when people were intentionally kind to each other."
What she found when she arrived in 1999 was decidedly different. The only people who were kind to her were other homeless people.
For years, she bought and sold drugs, using so much heroin that her health began to fail.
She felt invisible. "When you're a kid on the street, people don't see you, they don't acknowledge you," she said. "The only connection you have is with other homeless kids. No matter how tired, hungry or lonely you are, people just pass you by."
Now 25, Thibault works at the Homeless Youth Alliance, a storefront outreach center that offers a no-questions-asked refuge from the streets.
She greets drop-ins, some suffering from hacking coughs, others reeking from days without bathing. The street kids raid the center's refrigerator like college students home on spring break. One recent day, a teen devoured a bowl of cereal with a Swiss Army knife spoon as others dozed on couches."
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