While plenty of people will put forward their own theories on what exactly went wrong, I have my own pet theory that I’ve occasionally expounded on to those within earshot. In my view, our current issues can be directly traced to that so-called Summer of Love.

Picking that oft-romanticized event as the origin point of any modern crisis is probably surprising to many people. After all, wasn’t that a golden time where 20-somethings changed the world by engaging in positive thought and great music? Didn’t it bring an end to hate and prejudice?

If you ask me, not even close. All it spawned was a generation that learned that it was alright to indulge in selfish desires to the detriment of society at large. Even worse, they learned that all their sins could be forgiven if they simply justified them by saying that they were doing it to better the world.

In my eyes, those who participated in that farce of an event — not to mention the culture that spawned it — were self-involved idiots who rejected the multiple opportunities for real change that the tumults of the ’60s presented, and instead preferred to check out and indulge their base desires for drugs and music.

I’m not alone in this view, by the way. No less a public figure than George Harrison, the famed Beatle, found himself turned off by the whole scene after visiting San Francisco’s famous Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, calling the denizens “hideous, spotty little teenagers.”

The worst part was the way that they justified these hedonistic tendencies, by claiming that they were bettering the country and the world in some unidentified way.

I’d still love someone to tell me exactly how doing drugs and listening to music can improve the nation. If you know, my e-mail’s right over there.

Some might point to the civil rights movements and the large gains that it made as a sign that achievements were made.

Yet, I don’t really see Martin Luther King Jr. hanging out with the same crowd that flooded San Francisco at the time. The hippies might have been without prejudice, but that’s just a baseline of being civil and polite, and not real progress, if you ask me.

Still, the long-term damage didn’t really come at that time. If it had been isolated to that one period, it’s possible that the crowds would have eventually grown up and rejoined society in a productive way.

Unfortunately, what instead happened was their youthful temper tantrum became that much more important and grand when viewed through the lens of nostalgia.

Instead of being vilified for being selfish, they were celebrated.

Through this, they learned that it was alright to be self-involved, as long as it could be loosely justified as helping others in some nebulous fashion.

Thus, when they gained the reins of power in the ’80s, we suddenly found trickle-down economics, a theory in which those who had espoused the evil of money and all it brought could become as rich as they wanted, and it would be all good.

This could later be seen extending to the corporate thinking that brought our current travails. Those in power would do anything to bring individual wealth and short-term gains to a company, even if it harmed it in the long-term. But it was alright, because they were helping the stock price.

I have to say that Eric Cartman was right when he began his crusade against hippies. The country would probably be a lot better off if we’d simply take off our rose-colored glasses and look at that time for what it really was.

James Harrison is the State News opinion editor. Reach him at harri310@msu.edu.