1968 -- the Turning Point

Depends. Some in NY & DC were bigger than Chi, but a lot of us that went to Chi expected trouble (just not a police riot). Actually, the organization that did the most to arrange transit, etc, to Chi (my mind blanks on the name at the moment), had its headquarters in Powelton, in Philly, and I wound up as a bus marshall on one of the three busses (we left from NY). Heh...lessee, at least my ex & I came prepared; as Marshall, I got to loan a couple of women some blankets, and, halfway through Indiana, I got three guys who'd been hitching to Chi for the demonstration onto the bus.

Yeah...I think it was in April of '67 that I got interviewed in Philly, as we were getting ready to leave for NY, because I had a scavanged football helmet, and the reporter looked surprised when I said I expected trouble. Fortunately, the nearest we had was a bunch of construction workers shouting, threatening, and throwing eggs at one corner in NY...funny, they quieted down real fast when the line I was in, maybe 25 or 50 strong, marched up to and past them, looking at them, chanting "We love you", alternating with "join us!".

Yeah, some social, maybe meeting others, but mostly going with friends, or meeting new ones; it was the purpose of being there, (again, the petition for the redress of grievances was a popular phrase), and the community. The media split of "hippies" and politicals was pure invention on their part, and 75% - 85% pure shit; a way to split a genuine cultural movement into fragments that would not be viable independently. And I read Thoreau long after I'd started going to rallys. My dad was (as I mentioned) an unregenerate old Leftist, not an apologist for the Stalinists, and a lifelong union man. You might note that *some* of us, at least, were *not* "middle class"...

Yes. 68 was the watershed. When LBJ announced he wouldn't run again, we... our society, had a chance. I have heard Clark Clifford claim that Nixon had agents talking to the Vietnamese negotiators in Paris, stalling them, to give them the idea they'd get a better deal from him if he won. If that's true, that son of a slime mold (dogs don't deserve that infamy) killed us more than we even knew. And the elder Daley gave him every help, by arranging the police riot. What we could have been, as a country, and done.... I swear, if I get to go to where that bastard's buried, I want to dance on his grave, and spit on it, and, if given the chance, I'd dig it up and put a stake through its (alleged) heart.

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Do you remember '68, with the Tet offensive, the assinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the Chicago convention and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia? What did you think of when you watched those events unfold on the news?

Yeah. I remember all of the above. I thought different things about each of the above. I hadn't yet read Marx in '68. By then, I had come to define myself as an anarchist; but I didn't know what exactly I meant by it. I was also contradictory. As I said, I began that year supporting McCarthy and ended it wanting to vote for the Peace and Freedom Party. The assassinations just seemed to stem naturally from a society going bonkers. The Chicago Democratic Convention appalled me. The USSR's invasion of Czechoslovakia didn't come as a surprise; after all there had been Hungary.

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