Reply #10: it was required reading in grad school -- but i had already read [View All]

it as an activist-organizer in the 80s.

the class that required it was an urban planning seminar where we examined the culture of change. you know, being a "change agent."

the funny thing is, i didn't appreciate it until the class. the first read was sorta like, "well, duh." :) when do we get to the *good* part. the utopia... or whatever it was that i thought was "beyond the rhetoric."

and yes -- abbie hoffman was da man. here's a very cool read on the subject...

Chant Down Babylon by Minstrel Boy (as he's been known on DU)
http://rigint.blogspot.com/2006/06/chant-down-babylon_23.html

Maybe more Yippie, and less Hippie?

Yesterday on the RI board, "Johnny Nemo" remembered Abbie Hoffman saying "There were all these activists, you know, Berkeley radicals, White Panthers... all trying to stop the war and change things for the better. Then we got flooded with all these 'flower children' who were into drugs and sex. Where the hell did the hippies come from?"

The Yippies were trickster revolutionaries, who staged shamanic acts to advance social transformation. They led thousands to the Pentagon in 1967 to attempt its levitation. They crashed the galleries of Wall Street to shower money on the trading floor. They ran a pig for president. But the decade, in America's memory, belongs to the Hippies.

(much more at the link above...)