The summer of love, half a century later

Here in California, summer is becoming a memory. The kids are back at school, the baseball season has finished, and camping gear is now accumulating dust in the cupboards. The momentary carelessness of the northern summer is fast fading behind us. The American summer of 2017, however, was anything but carefree. Against the backdrop of an erratic Trump presidency, the lingering threat of war with North Korea, the parading of violent white supremacists on the streets and the relentless excesses of an angry ecology, a deep anxiety permeated the holidays.