The Young Have to Be There
Hoffman, Abbie
REFLECTIONS Abbie Hoffman The Young Have to Be There The Left has a marvelous ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. The great contradiction of the 1960s was exactly how much we...
...We had a movement for freer lifestyles...
...Sure we were young...
...controversial speakers on campus...
...I'm convinced that it's not a majority...
...Young people cared because there were just more young people to care...
...In 1968, the pinnacle year of the '60s, a poll of students showed that the most popular Americans were Richard Nixon and John Wayne, in that order...
...When I was four, my mother said, "There's millions of people starving in China...
...It's in its first ten years...
...Wearing your hair long might have seemed frivolous to some of the more straight people on the Left in the 1960s, but I telLyou that was a full-time commitment because you were ostracized from your community...
...That's what it was in the 1960s...
...I don't want to hear about the commies in the woods...
...Minimum wages were $40 a week—that's what we got, and it wasn't so bad...
...Why trust anybody under thirty these days...
...You cannot have social revolution, you cannot have change without the young...
...Freedom now...
...You were picked up by the cops...
...The combination of affluence, demographics, the resistance to the 1950s that was there—all those elements are not going to happen again...
...Out of that grew a movement...
...First of all, we ended Jim Crow...
...The young have to be there...
...They have to assume their place because the young have the creativity, they have the energy, they have the impatience...
...It had meaning...
...student control of the newspapers...
...I don't like what's going ,on in South Africa, and I want it done now...
...I've always left the concept of sin to the Catholic Church...
...We were American in every sense of the word, especially in our excesses...
...It was fun to have that sense of engagement where you jumped on the earth and the earth jumped back—the sense that you were a part of history...
...to vote when you're eighteen...
...We were brash...
...In 1964, only 8 per cent of the American public opposed U.S...
...Apartheid—let's call it what it was...
...You simply can't do it...
...I think the greatest legacy of the 1960s was the general feeling that not only can you fight the powers that be, but you can win...
...Then, of course, there was the war in Vietnam...
...It's not "everybody" that agrees with you...
...co-ed dorms...
...You could get your head shaved...
...We had factional fights...
...Today you look at that and say, "My God, it's hotbeds of social rest out there...
...it's never a moral majority that makes the change...
...You got Chinese food on Friday...
...Of course we do...
...We were ridiculous...
...If you look at the history of Western civilization, foreign wars in particular have been extremely popular...
...We had the same percentage of business-administration majors and engineers that we have today...
...ROTC out, CIA out...
...I've never liked guilt-tripping...
...It's not "nobody" that cares...
...You were kicked out of classes...
...I started right off trying to resist guilt...
...Eat your dinner...
...There was a student movement in this country...
...We're never going to have the affluence...
...So I want to emphasize what we pulled off in the 1960s, what I think we achieved...
...We were arrogant...
...We brought down legal segregation...
...A student movement achieved great collective and individual rights that young people barely appreciate today...
...You can't find another foreign war of aggression fought by such a powerful country where the people rose up and said, "Bring the troops home...
...And when Kent State and Jackson State happened, 800 universities went out on strike, but there were 5,000 universities...
...The fact that 75 per cent of Americans are against contra aid is as irrelevant to me as the fact that 75 per cent of Americans have wanted universal health care since 1947, and we don't have it...
...If it was up to the Left to make a revolution in America, we'd still be trying to figure out how three people can get out of a phone booth—two trying to figure out how they can leave the third one in the phone booth because that person is really a revisionist...
...So all of a sudden there was a student movement, and tremendous individual and collective rights were won: the right Abbie Hoffman, a leader of the resistance to the Vietnam war in the 1960s and an environmental activist in the 1980s, died in April at the age of fifty-two...
...You can wear a bra or not wear a bra, even if you're a guy, it's like okay...
...It was apartheid that had existed for almost 200 years, give or take a few years during Reconstruction...
...Now kids can wear their hair long, short, red, blue, pink, shave it off, or whatever...
...People ask me, "Do we have a Vietnam in Central America...
...You need the youth to dissent...
...I don't want to hear all the political considerations...
...It is never going to happen again...
...You have to say, "I don't want to hear about constructive engagement...
...To be effective, you have to realize that you work between the parameters of nobody and everybody...
...policy in Southeast Asia, and the war had been going for ten years...
...What is the role of the student in the university...
...The leaves of apathy are stirring on the campuses...
...In the '60s we went beyond the Left in our style, in our language...
...That's what you need...
...We were foolish...
...So these freer lifestyles were won because of what happened in the 1960s...
...It was fun to go out there and say, "The emperor's got no damn clothes on...
...But we were right...
...You went out...
...That came to an end...
...No way...
...But it did actually happen here...
...How many people do you need to make a change...
...This article, adaptedfrom a speech, appeared in slightly longer form in the Fall 1986 issue ofSocial Policy magazine, from which it is reprinted by permission...
...I said, "Ma, name one...
...Campuses have traditionally been yuppie training camps and places where you go to work on your careers and your marriages—where young rich ladies and gentlemen went to become older rich ladies and gentlemen...
...The music is never going to be that good, the sex is never going to be that free, the dope is never going to be that cheap...
...Students asked, "What is the role of the university in society...
...I speak on about sixty campuses a year, and I meet young activists out there...
...I tried to give people a sense that it was in us to be altruistic, to be curious, to explore, to be creative, and that taking on the powers that be was the best game in town...
...Can it happen again...
...There were excesses...
...The great contradiction of the 1960s was exactly how much we pulled off—how far we got with how few and how little knowledge...
...We would have troops in Nicaragua for sure tonight if it hadn't been for Vietnam...
Vol. 53 • June 1989 • No. 6
