Forest-I was in school during the 60′s. The radicals then, many who now call themselves anarchists, weren’t shy at all about their exact intent. It may have taken a bit to decipher it, due to their penchant for psuedo-intellectual and often drug enhanced language. But after a while their actions toward certain of our(those of us who didn’t agree with them) actions helped with translation. They screamed it in the media, in the classrooms and in our faces, so close we could count their teeth and hear the ringing in our ears. I was literally slammed against the wall physically and verbally with their message. What we heard them saying was basically-”Down with the establishment because our parents built it and they are wrong because they are controlling and money hungry and won’t agree with our point of view. Down with all of their laws and morals because they are wrong, because they don’t agree with us, and anyone who is not with us is against us.” This is the short version, since the original was profanely inserted every other word, with a four letter word.(although one of their all time faves was 6 letters added to ‘mother’)and also included whatever personal agenda each group hung onto as the only right way to go. The only thing they had in common is that they ALL agreed that the ‘establishment’ just had to be destroyed.
I went to school with them, encountered them on the street and lived with some of them. One of my exroom mates still keeps tabs on me, doesn’t talk to me because I don’t agree with her. She considers me to be wrong because I don’t do things her way.
Because I wore a mini skirt, didn’t smoke, drink, swear or toke and refused to give it away and insisted on wearing my bras, I was treated as one of the enemy. I was told that I was wrong because I had the gaul to disagree with them.It was alright for them to disagree with me, but I didn’t have the right to disagree with them.Many of the original ‘radicals’ of the 60′s came from wealthy and middle class families from the eastern states, or at least the ones I knew, did, and the ones they knew did. They were out to make the world a far different place than the one their parents had made. What is really ironic is that a lot of them gave birth to the yuppy movement, which was even more involved in what their parents were involved in.Hm…
When we were in junior high/middle school, we attended fairly clean and fairly innocent sockhops. By my senior year, senior cut day was an actual drunken orgy and I could smell the burning back 40 in the halls of our school(as in weed, not weeds). We were listening to such psychadelic music as ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’, ‘Light My Fire’and ‘In the Desert With a Horse With no Name’. Several girls were pregnant their senior year or already married-which isn’t, unfortunately, earth shattering, now. But then, it was still pretty touchy. This all influenced the attitude of the times. We heard the Beatles/Joan Baez/Judy Collins/Peter Paul and Mary the Smothers Brothers and Timothy Leary etc constantly telling us to not under any circumstances trust anyone who wasn’t from our generation or didn’t think like us. Plus Tom(Ted?) Laehr(sp) singing about pollution-for the generation who grew up having bombing drills in school by hiding under our desks. And on top of this we had Vietnam Vets coming home as very old men in young men’s bodies, experiencing what we didn’t have a clue about and dealing with very serious issues of drugs, reentry and post-traumatic-stress-syndrome and whatever they may have lost and left on the battle field and the way they had been pilloried on their return to this country. This was some of the confusing mix of the times-plus the assassinations/school shootings/publicized orgies/mass murders/drug over doses/kidnappings/hostage situations/riots/bank robberies-demonstrations-all kinds of demonstrations-marches/riots/sit-ins/sing-ins/takeovers, most to get one point across, that the party doing the damage insisted that the receiving party was wrong and therefore no longer entitled to running the country. But the other side was just as intolerant they brought out the cops in riot gear and billy clubs, which they did use, oh yes and a lot of teargas and some bullets.(Only some of this was about the Vietnam War)
This was also the generation who grew up on ‘Father Knows Best’, ‘Ozzy and Harriet’. ‘Andy Griffith” The Ed Sullivan Show’ ‘Jack Benny”,’The Smothers Brothers’ ‘Sonny and Cher’. and ‘Laugh-in’,etc to help to give you a flavor for the time.
As for the muslim issue. I have a cousin who was married into the muslim community for 25 years and I have talked to many muslims in my travels in and out of Europe over the past 10 years. This is what we have been told by almost every muslim we have talked to-When the day of the prophet comes all muslims are obligated to rise up and kill all infidels(non muslims)or be killed themselves, and that the people of the Book(Jews and Christians-read any non muslim)were replaced by the muslims because we all screwed up and the muslims are now god’s chosen people, and that it is their job to rid this planet of the scourge that we have become and to repopulate this planet with the only right way/religion-as in islam.
There is a similarity in the intolerance, which might explain why the anarchist movement doesn’t see the muslim terroists as the problem. However, just as in the Cold War, the Communists used ‘fellow travelers’ only as long as they were useful, then eliminated them, the same would be true for the muslims with the anarchists.-Fellow traveler-someone who helped to enable the actual sabatour, and was sympathetic toward the cause involved, but were not themselves a sabatour or spy.
