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The so-called Flower People began as a protest movement, in the United States, of the 1964-65 buildup of military forces in Vietnam following the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. "Operation Rolling Thunder" and the bombing of the communist Vietnamese forces in Laos followed the overthrow of French occupation of Vietnam or "French Indochina" in 1954. The wealthy and liberal student community of the University of California at Berkeley began a small group of the earliest protest marchers and protest speakers, and they had the time to organize college "teach-ins", which formed a foundation that gave rise to a wider protest moment, forming a symbolic core by the expressions of peace through music, and poetry, and art. It was a combination of questioning the war build up, and years later added an expression of drug culture and a rejection of authority. I would say that the teenagers took hold of the act of protesting in their own selfish interests, and this gave way to a wider "movement" of experimentation with drugs and general expressions of counter-culture. By this time, the Golden Gate Park became a gathering place for the "Hippie Movement", being approximately a half dozen blocks from Haight and Ashbury intersection and the home of Janis Joplin. The earliest intellectual protestors were mainly wealthy kids who did not have to work because their parents had money. As the protests formed a following, the message became the messengers. Ironically, the birthplace of the movement, which was a form of radical political participation, had changed and left behind it's original purpose, and it somewhat destroyed it's center of creation. But it was the intellectuals among the Berkeley-ites who started it all, even if SFO gets credit for the popular lifestyle years later.
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