Select this to read [the Whole Story].
I thought we needed more democracy. I think Abbie thought that too.
I'm thinking about alienation of youth now. Did anyone ever harass you for being a member of the counterculture?
No. But the threat was always there. It was in the air. You didn't want to be anywhere near rednecks and rednecks were almost everywhere.
Were you regarded as a communist?
Not a CP member; but I was a known socialist. I ran "against" congress in 1974 on the Socialist Labor Party ticket.
A traitor?
Few people call ex-Marines traitor.
An anarchist?
I've been called that by both the left and the right.
Did the police ever give you any grief -- drug searches and the like... did you feel alienated from the American culture?
Alienated. For sure. Police are always grief. I was only arrested once for being in a building with 165 other students, who were discussing the Kent State and Jackson State murders. It was May 4,1970. We wern't planning to be arrested, i.e. it wasn't a sit-in. We just continued our teach-in after the building, the Student Union had been officially closed. We didn't want to be arrested; we just wanted to talk.
Was the "second
American revolution" revolution founded upon the same rationale that Jefferson
expressed in the Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are equal, that they are
endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are
life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights,
governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the
consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive to those ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it.
Precisely. However, as I've said above, I believed that democracy had evolved from Jefferson's time. I did think that capitalism had become destructive of those ends and the way I saw/see it is that the employing class is the ruling class and therefore the prime movers of governmental policy in the USA. That is to say, governmentlal policy is shaped according to the interests of the capitalist class; just as it was in the countries ruled by the Communists. [They believed in the] dogma of my country, right or wrong. Red necks would beat protestors up. Protestors did not usually fight back on an individual level. If crowds were plowed in to by cars of rednecks, there would be a violent response.
Would they take place in public or in private?
They would happen both in public and private. At that time, having hair which was long was considered an act of anti-war activity. You were a target, if you had long hair. The silent majority who came out to contend with you.We were questioning all authority which came from the Establishment. On the other hand, the people who supported the Establishment saw their ideals and dogmas under attack. Being conservative of those dogmas and ideals, they saw Nixon people as giving voice to their frustrations. Disinformation by the major media plus bourgeois politicians=what democracy we had at that time.
Select this to read [the Whole Story].
