Hunter S. Thompson, Ken Kesey, and Timothy Leary are responsible for turning a whole generation into a bunch of drug-addled layabouts (my dad -a tried and true hippie- is a perfect example of such). I hardly consider them to be "mavericks" of that period time. Perhaps the hippies out there would, as they "benefited" directly from their "findings".

Allister Crowley was a devout satanist and one-time founder of a satan-worshipping group called the "OTO" (Ordo Templi Orientis), which (among other things) had Charles Manson and L. Ron Hubbard as members at one point. So he's hardly what I'd call a "benevolent" figure of the era, either.

I'd hardly call the Vietnam Conflict a "cultured" period of time, either. A great many people died during that whole that period of time, and the dissent created in part by those "cultured" hippies only made a bad situation much MUCH worse.

And why are people meaner now than back then? Because the rest of us grew up during the seventies, where we had to contend with the fall-out of the decade before, that's why. We've had to contend with the fall-out of our hippie parents' free-wheeling ways and the "mind-expanding" drugs they ingested by the truck load. We've also had to take up the slack for their lack-of-maturity the decade before.

So no- the sixties weren't the "enlightened" time people think it is. It's like the old saying goes- If you remember the sixties, you probably never experienced it.

brady bunch delusions.