The views expressed by the leading voices of the counterculture were extremely controversial in the sixties and have remained so since that time. Millions of today's Americans are of the belief that the world would have been a better place if the years of "free love," LSD, and protest had never happened. Others think that saying "no" to war, expanding human consciousness with drugs, and relaxing the rigid social mores of the fifties were worth the costs.

Whatever one's belief about that time so long ago, the fact remains that the fallout—good and bad—from the sixties counterculture remains a part of mainstream culture today. And it is intricately woven into the social fabric of America at the dawn of the twenty-first century.