Category: Protests and Crackdowns

By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Politics, Protests and Crackdowns, Shel's Personal Life, Socially Responsible Investing Tagged with , , ,

Entergy’s Vermont Yankee nuclear plant’s license expired Wednesday night, after 40 years. 40 years of leaks, collapsing cooling tower, tritium in the water, unexpected outages…in short, 40 years of a very poor safety record.

I’m looking at the first page of the official Atomic Energy Commission report on Abnormal Occurrences for the 1973–the last year a full report is available, because after that the AEC (which then became the so-called Nuclear Regulatory Commission, or NRC). Only a year into its use cycle, when it should have shaken out all the problems and long before radioactive corrosion, old age or other more recent stress factors, Vermont Yankee reported 39 separate incidents–that’s nearly one per week. Page one of the report, reprinted in the classic book No Nukes, by Anna Gyorgy and Friends (page 107 in my 1977 edition), shows that the first six included:

  • A switch in the Emergency Core Cooling System that failed to activate (potentially extremely serious)
  • Four miscalibrated radiation monitors
  • Power supply failure of a gamma radiation monitor on the perimeter
  • Discovery that some instrument sensor tubes were connected wrong, because the plant’s designers produced faulty drawings
  • Unplanned shutdown following an explosion that fractured the air ejector rupture disc, and release of radiation
  • A second air ejector rupture disc fracture and release of radiation

Again, these are just the first six of 39, during a single year of the plant’s 40-year operation.

Meanwhile, as a condition of operation, Entergy agreed a few years ago to be bound by approval of the state legislature to continue operation past its license expiration. Yet, when the state senate voted 26-4 in 2010 to close the plant, Entergy (which had expected at the tine it signed the agreement to win the legislative approval) reneged, sued the state, and actually found a judge–John Murtha–who issued an idiotic decision in the company’s favor, saying the legislature was clearly concerned about safety and nuclear safety was reserved for the federal government–specifically, for the NRC, which has so far NEVER to my knowledge turned down either a new or renewal license. (They should rename themselves the Nuclear Rah-Rah Cheerleaders)

So much for democracy, state’s rights, etc. The legislature, the governor, and a large majority of the state’s population (not to mention numerous government officials in both Massachusetts and New Hampshire, both of which are within four miles of the plant) all want to see this monstrosity shut down.

The state is appealing, but somehow, there’s no injunction to keep the plant from operating until the suit is resolved.

Along with about 1600 other people, I went up to Brattleboro, Vermont today to protest Yankee’s continued operation. Some 130 people got arrested. I didn’t, but my 93-year-old friend Frances Crowe did. I first met Frances, a Northampton, Massachusetts hero and living treasure, in 1977, when we were both incarcerated in the Manchester, NH National Guard Armory when 1414 of us were arrested at the construction site for the Seabrook, NH nuke. I saw a number of people today who I remembered from that and other Clamshell Alliance actions in the late 1970s.

Nuclear is a really dumb idea. I wrote a whole book on it. From a safety, economics, fuel efficiency, or even carbon footprint point of view, nuclear power is a disaster. And the GE Mark I design used at 23 US reactors including Vermont Yankee–the same one used at Fukushima–is particularly bad. Why are we mortgaging our future for no benefit?

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By Posted on Posted in Democracy, Diversity, Ethics in Government, Politics, propaganda, Protests and Crackdowns, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , ,

…But I’m going to write it anyway.

As a young teenager protesting the Vietnam war, I had a huge poster in my room with a picture of a Vietnam-era peace demonstration and the quote,

It is a sin to be silent when it is your duty to protest.

—Abraham Lincoln

It is my duty to protest.

I am only one generation removed from the Holocaust, and I wonder how many millions of lives might have been saved if ordinary Germans and Italians had protested and organized in large numbers against the gradual encroachments on their liberty that provided the legal framework for Nazi and Fascist repression.

Earlier this week, while the rest of us were merrily celebrating the arrival of 2012, President Obama signed a truly wretched piece of legislation: The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

In the words of one commentator whose post is entitled “R.I.P. Bill of Rights 1789 – 2011,” this law

grants the U.S. military the “legal” right to conduct secret kidnappings of U.S. citizens, followed by indefinite detention, interrogation, torture and even murder. This is all conducted completely outside the protection of law, with no jury, no trial, no legal representation and not even any requirement that the government produce evidence against the accused. It is a system of outright government tyranny against the American people, and it effectively nullifies the Bill of Rights.

Signed into law by the same President Obama who, as a candidate, was the champion of liberty and “change” who would close the illegal prison at Guantanamo, rein in the torturers of Abu Ghraib, and quickly end the US presence in Iraq. The same Obama who had said he would veto this dreadful bill. (Yes, the soldiers have come home. But it took three years and we still have thousands of “advisors” there, along with a highly fortified embassy in Baghdad  that could easily be the nerve center for US command and control.) Guantanamo is still open, the climate of anti-Muslim racism persists, and the torturers at the highest levels (e.g., Cheney and Rumsfeld) have never been held to account.)

So I am protesting. Even though it puts my own liberty potentially at risk.

In his signing statement, Obama said he would…

interpret and implement the provisions described below in a manner that …upholds the values on which this country was founded.

Two problems with that. Number 1, he has not shown himself trustworthy in upholding those values in the past.

And second, there is no guarantee that the presidency won’t be delivered to a much more repressive figure with no such scruples. The contenders on the Republican side include several sworn enemies of freedom for those of us who don’t happen to be straight, conservative, and some repressive flavor of Christian: Bachmann, Gingrich, Perry, and Santorum (in alphabetical order).

This is merely the latest in a gradual erosion of our civil liberties committed during both Democratic and Republican governments; two other examples (among many) are the shift over the last two decades of ballot counting to insecure, easily manipulated, and highly suspect electronic counting devices that in some cases don’t even HAVE a paper trail (and that led directly to the disastrous worst-in-history administration of George W. Bush) and the citizens United Supreme Court decision that nakedly grants corporations the power to buy elections.

Yes I protest.

I have never forgiven myself for not doing enough to stop the coup that let Bush seize power in 2000—in part because I didn’t see Gore as any great champion of my values, in part because I could not foresee just how bad that eight years was going to be—but mostly because I was feeling too shut down and disempowered to help organize a movement like we saw in Mexico, Iran, Egypt, and elsewhere.

I still don’t feel like I can personally organize a movement. But I can at least protest, and send some money to a civil liberties group.  I hope you will too.

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By Posted on Posted in censorship, Democracy, Diversity, Ethics in Government, language, Media Ethics, National Conference on Media Reform, Politics, propaganda, Protests and Crackdowns, Publishing, Social and Economic Justice, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

An Oregon judge ruled that blogging is not protected as journalism under the state’s journalism shield law. If allowed to stand, this sets a truly terrible precedent.

Here’s what the law says:

No person connected with, employed by or engaged in any medium of communication to the public shall be required by … a judicial officer … to disclose, by subpoena or otherwise … [t]he source of any published or unpublished information obtained by the person in the course of gathering, receiving or processing information for any medium of communication to the public[.]

Notice—there is nothing here about working for a recognized mainstream media outlet. By my reading, a guy in a clown suit standing on a milk crate in the park and haranguing a crowd of random passers-by would not have to disclose sources.

Yet here’s what U.S. District Judge Marco A. Hernandez wrote:

. . . although defendant is a self-proclaimed “investigative blogger” and defines herself as “media,” the record fails to show that she is affiliated with any newspaper, magazine, periodical, book, pamphlet, news service, wire service, news or feature syndicate, broadcast station or network, or cable television system. Thus, she is not entitled to the protections of the law

Hello! Since when does being a journalist require working for mainstream media? This country has a history of independent writers serving a journalistic role going back to those 18th-century “bloggers” Tom Paine and Ben Franklin—those guys didn’t write for the London Times, but started their own publications. Are you going to tell me that Daily Kos, Huffington Post, RedState, Drudge Report, Washington Spectator, and even the legendary I.F. Stone’s Weekly of the 1950s and 1960s have no place in the world of journalism? That the thousands of indy-media-istas who attend the National Conference for Media Reform are spitting in the wind?

And meanwhile, investigative blogger Crystal Cox is facing a $2.5 million judgment because she would not disclose her sources. Out-bloody-rageous!

Shame on you, Judge Hernandez!

Abraham Lincoln said, “It is a sin to be silent when it is your duty to protest.” I am protesting. And I hope voices with more clout than mine, such as FreePress.net, the National Writers Union, Authors Guild, American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), People for the American Way, National Coalition Against Censorship, and opinion journalists working for mainstream media (like Rachel Maddow) jump in and protest as well—with amicus briefs filed for the appeal.

 

Kris Miller Law is a respected and trusted  criminal defense attorney ready to help you with your legal needs.

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By Posted on Posted in Politics, propaganda, Protests and Crackdowns Tagged with , , , , ,

I keep waiting for one of these Great Defenders of Property Rights—you know, people like Limbaugh, Hannity, Coulter, and O’Reilly—to step forward and make some noise about the way the police wantonly destroyed property of individual occupiers and resources belonging to the community as a whole during the evictions last week. Among other things, a 5000-volume library was destroyed. I can’t see any reason for this.

Of course, I don’t expect the right-wing pundits to make any noise about the shameful treatment by police of some of the occupiers, such as the outrageous incident on the UC-Davis campus, where police used pepper spray in the faces of peaceful, sitting protestors—something that has one professor calling for the chancellor to resign. But since protecting private property has been so near and dear to their hearts over the years, I hold them to the same standard when the property being destroyed is that of their opponents.

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By Posted on Posted in Democracy, Peace and War, Politics, Protests and Crackdowns, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

Today is Election Day in the United States. And something like the 7th week of the Occupy Wall Street/Occupy Everywhere movement that sprung up in September.

A good day to reflect on different social change strategies—as someone who’s done both grassroots and electoral politics.

I began to get involved in grassroots movements in the fall of 1969, shortly before my 13th birthday. I marched to end the war in Vietnam, was arrested at the 1977 Seabrook occupation trying to shift society away from nuclear power and toward safe energy, and organized on a whole raft of social justice, environmental, and human rights issues over the decades. I even founded the grassroots community group that saved a mountain. This activism led directly to my career as a marketing consultant; much of my early work in marketing drew on my experience doing publicity for the grassroots groups, and my move toward green marketing in the last 12 years or so is a natural outgrowth of my need to braid together these two stands of my life: the activist and the entrepreneur.

On the electoral side, I’ve been an active volunteer on numerous campaigns, managed a successful City Council campaign, wrote press releases for a successful mayoral candidate—and ran three times for local office.

Nonviolent Action Brings Down Governments

This year, we’ve once again seen massive evidence of the power of grassroots nonviolent activism to bring down governments. In Tunisia and then Egypt, deeply entrenched autocratic governments were forced out. (Libya, which was more of a civil war, lots of violence on both sides, is a different case.) Historically, this pattern has shown itself countless times, though often taking much longer to achieve victory. A few worth mentioning: India, 1930s-40s; South Africa, 1976-94; Poland, Czech Republic, and much of the former Soviet bloc, 1968-1990. And yes, we have to put the 1979 revolution in Iran in this category, showing that active nonviolence can be used toward authoritarian as well as democratic ends.

And this is important to note: activists have to have a plan for victory, and for safeguarding the democracies we fight so hard to establish. I’m very concerned right now that Egypt’s new government will prove just as authoritarian as Mubarak’s.

Also, we have to note that nonviolent organizing doesn’t always work. American protestors opposing World War I accomplished very little (though the feminists of the same period accomplished quite a bit). Tibet is still deeply repressed by China, more than 50 years into the occupation.

The Occupy Movement and the Broader World of US Social Protest

While the Occupy protests owe much to this long heritage of nonviolent action, the demands on Wall Street are different than the demands of Arab Spring. The 99 percenters are not looking to toss out the Obama government. They are simply calling for economic justice. They’ve been criticized in mainstream media for a lack of a cohesive vision, but in this situation, a simple cry for justice may be enough.

While inspired by Arab Spring, Occupy’s real roots are in the issue campaigns in the US going back at least into the 19th century: labor, civil rights, peace, feminism, LGBT, safe energy, and so forth—and decision-making structures, especially, owe much to Clamshell Alliance and other players in the 1970s safe energy movement. All of these movements can point to massive victories—to cultural changes. The kinds of oppressive behavior that were considered normal a few decades back are no longer socially acceptable.

Yet many other movements like these also failed to make a difference. The more people in the Occupy movement who can take the time to study what worked and didn’t work in social movements, the more likely they are to achieve their goals.

Electoral Politics

If the process of organizing in the streets seems slow, the process of moving change forward by electing progressives seems glacial. For every Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan who is able to accomplish enormous structural change while in office, there are dozens of Jimmy Carters and Bill Clintons, hamstrung by budgetary constraints, partisan warfare, and their own desire to please everyone (pleasing no one in the process).

I’m not just talking about presidents. Most people enter Congress, or even local political bodies, out of a desire to do good in the world, and are quickly beaten down by the system (or corrupted by the platform it provides to enrich themselves, their financial backers, and their friends). For every fire-and-brimstone Bernie Sanders, there are dozens in office whose names we don’t even know unless we live in their districts—people who are not making much of a difference.

A charismatic figure like Barack Obama can galvanize support and get elected—but then has to either show real progress, fast, in a social structure that moves painfully slowly and is steered by forces outside the victor’s control, or show how the opposition’s intransigence is a roadblock to progress and press for a larger, stronger governing coalition. So far, Obama hasn’t risen to the challenge, though he’s showing signs of moving in that direction. He could still become one of our great presidents—but in failing to act, he risks becoming a one-term nonentity that dashed the hopes of those who voted for change and didn’t receive it.

Occupy Wall Street actually presents Obama a huge opportunity: to embrace the progressive agenda he was elected to advance, to use the anger of the people in the streets to “have his back” as he pushes for real change, and to negate the arguments of Tea Partiers and other right-wing extremists that his minor reforms are “going too fast.” I doubt he’ll seize the moment, but I’d love to be proven wrong.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability, People Helping People, Politics, Protests and Crackdowns, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , ,

I love this! Recognizing that they need to be part of the solution and not just the agitation, permaculture experts have started some deep green initiatives including graywater recycling–at Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, home to the original Occupy Wall Street demonstration/encampment.

Once again, the protests remind me of the remarkable communities we had during the Seabrook occupation and our subsequent incarceration at various national guard armories, back in 1977.

Note: if they can do permaculture in an impermanent camp in a city park, we should be able to do it all over the country and the world in our permanent dwellings.

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By Posted on Posted in Democracy, Events, Peace and War, Politics, Protests and Crackdowns, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , ,

This morning, a reporter posted a query on HARO (a free service that matches reporters with story sources) asking,

Were you a protester/activist back in the 1960s? If so, what's
your reaction to the current Wall Street protest and the
off-shoots around the country?

I thought my response was worth sharing with a wider audience:



Hi, Sondra, I went to my first demonstration about the Vietnam war in 1969 and was very active in protests all through the 1970s and beyond. I was arrested at Seabrook in 1977, committed civil disobedience but was not arrested at the Wall Street Acton in 1979, was a peacekeeper for the million-person march for peace in 1982. I probably still attend three to five demonstrations in a typical year, mostly local (Western Massachusetts) –but I did go to massive demos in Washington and NYC to try to keep us out of Iraq in 2002-03. Also, using other methods than street demonstrations, I have been an active organizer for decades. My biggest success was forming a group called Save the Mountain, which generated widespread community support and blocked a particularly horrible housing proposal next to a state park–after all the “experts” said there was nothing we could do.


As it happens, today I’m getting on a bus for an evening conference on sustainability in NYC, and staying over for the night. Tomorrow morning my plan is to go to Wall Street and see how things are going.


As a teenager, I had a poster in my room with a picture of a peace demonstration and the caption, “It is a sin to be silent when it is your duty to protest –Abraham Lincoln”–and I guess that pretty much sums up my feeling.


Obama has been a very weak president, falling short on issue after issue about bringing the “change” he was elected to create. He has given us a slower–and in some cases faster (like drone killings)–version of the “new normal” that developed under the illegal government of George W. Bush. No one has even been indicted for the crimes against the people by the Bush government or by the looters in suits in the financial industry. I believe strongly in the power of nonviolent protest, and am thrilled to see a new generation stepping forward, willing as we were to disrupt their lives in order to make a difference. Street protest is certainly not the only approach, and I believe we need multiple simultaneous nonviolent approaches. The country has gotten so topsy turvy and out of balance that I don’t think Richard Nixon would be tolerated by the Republican Party anymore (he’s probably to the left of Obama, if you watch both men’s actions rather than their words), and even their ‘sainted’ Reagan would be too far left to be nominated today. We desperately need an effective Left in this country, and the Occupy movement is stepping up, even if it has not figured out yet how to articulate its mission and goals.

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For more than 30 years, one of the arguments I’ve made against nuclear power is the chilling effect on our freedom.


Now, it seems that Japan may have passed a law heading down that slippery slope. Or not—I am not so far convinced that the claims are accurate.


A blogger for the UK Progressive put up a rambling, jumbled article claiming that Japan has passed a law giving sweeping powers to shut down bloggers, people who post videos on Youtube, etc. when they’re critical of the government and/or TEPCO.


I did a bit of Googling and found dozens of other blogs basing their story on that same article, which I consider unreliable. But I did find this in the Tokyo Times, which seems to be a genuine news organization that fact-checks and posts corrections. The Tokyo Times article says the Computer Network Monitoring Law was passed on June 17.


It also says that during March and April, even before the law was passed, government agents sent 41


“letters of request” to internet providers, telecom companies, cable TV stations and others to take measures in order to respond to illegal information, including erasing any information from the Internet that can be seen as harmful to morality and public order.


However, this article links back to coverage in the Examiner which again ties back to the original, untrustworthy blog post. I certainly am not going to pore over all 6000 citations to see whether this story is legitimate. But it’s certainly worth keeping an eye on.

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Here’s one for the Encyclopedia Idiotica: Entergy, owner of the sorely troubled Vermont Yankee nuclear plant (with a history of safety issues going back at least to 1974 when the plant was quite new),


Cooling tower failure, Vermont Yankee
Vermont Yankee cooling tower fails, 2008. Photo by ISC ALC, Creative Commons license


just spent $50 million on new fuel and committed another $42 million to installing that fuel, knowing full well that the state will consider any operation beyond March, 2012 illegal. And this doesn’t count $100 million in post-Fukushma upgrades that will be required in the next few years.


The issue of whether Vermont Yankee will be bound by state law and forced to shut down March 21, 2012 will be adjudicated in court this September: a lawsuit brought on by Entergy’s attempt to torpedo its 2006 agreement to abide by the state’s decision, once it became obvious that the vote was not going Entergy’s way.


Add to this a few other factors:


    

  • Vermont Yankee is one of 23 reactors in the US that use essentially the same design as Fukushima; it’s not out of the question that the federal government could unilaterally shut all those plants down.
    • 

  • The year-long Associated Press study on nuclear power safety showed glaring holes in the entire industry; a new citizen action network, like the one of the late 70s, could revitalize the safe energy/no nukes movement and bring enormous pressure to close all the nuclear plants in the US.
    • 

  • In New England, opposition to nuclear power is already deeply entrenched and fairly well organized. It was New England’s Clamshell Alliance, after all, that gave birth to the national nuclear shutdown movement of the 1970s and 1980s. Even if Entergy manages to win in court, it’s obvious that any attempt to keep the plant running will be met with massive citizen opposition including very public protests and civil disobedience. This will inevitably make keeping the plant open a very expensive and slow operation.
    • 



And I’ll bet that Entergy will raise an argument on the order of “you can’t make us shut down, we just spent $92 million to refuel.” Since the company knew full well that this money could be completely wasted and went ahead anyway, I hope that Judge Murtha not only refuses to consider that line of “reasoning,” but makes sure the entire cost is borne not by innocent taxpayers and ratepayers of Vermont, not even by stockhoders who had nothing to do with this decision, but by the members of the Board of Directors who voted to squander this money, and to the executives that pushed for this vote.

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Watching the fireworks from my lawn last night, I found myself thinking about a long-ago July 4th, and how it helped shape who I am today.


The year was 1976. I was a scrawny, long-haired, 19-year-old peace and human rights activist who had just finished my senior term at Antioch College.


I was broke and jobless. And, not having any better plan, I was going to hitchhike around the United States for the summer, shifting my itinerary depending on where the rides were going. Though I was pretty sure I wanted to see Denver and San Francisco, at least, I knew it was a big country with lots to explore, and I hadn’t seen very much of it so far. I didn’t know a thing about hitchhiking, and I hadn’t done any research about what to bring—though I did hook up briefly with a friend who was a very experienced hitchhiker, who showed me the basics of where to stand safely.


So off I went, with $200 in travelers checks in my pocket, and a bunch of inappropriate stuff packed in three inappropriate daypacks. I didn’t have a traveler’s frame pack, a sleeping bag, decent rain protection, a sun hat, or a lot of other things I should have thought about. Instead, I had an entire daypack filled with my creative output: poetry notebooks, my dream journal, and such. Plus a bare minimum of clothing and a bit of food.


I did, however, have a supply of thick markers for making hitchhiking signs that people could read at 60 miles per hour; even back then, I understood some basic marketing principles. 🙂


Setting off from my college town, Yellow Springs, Ohio, in late June, I stopped to visit family in New York before heading to Washington for the Bicentennial.


For weeks, I’d been growing more and more disgusted with the insane commercialism around the 200th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence—stuff like “Happy birthday, America, we’re having a sale on our new Fords because it’s your birthday,” accompanied by various patriotic songs.


I was, at that time, very alienated from mainstream American culture. The United States had finally pulled its last soldiers out of the Vietnam quagmire (which I’d been actively protesting since 1969), and Saigon had fallen only 14 months earlier. Examples of racism and sexism and homophobia and oppression of various minorities were easy to find. Police violence against progressives and racial minorities was a part of daily life, and we assumed we were being spied on.


I’d recently completed an internship at a socialist newspaper in Georgia, where the sense of “us against them” was palpable—and where the advertising base had largely abandoned the paper as soon as a safe, bourgeois counterculture paper started publishing, providing access to the lucrative hippie market around Atlanta without funding anti-government journalism. I saw business as the enemy of progress, and could not have named a single example of a business trying to do good, other than a couple of leftist bookstores and healthfood co-ops. I’d been a vegetarian for almost three years, and had discovered that this made me unwelcome in many restaurants.


In short, I was disenfranchised, cynical, militant, and even hostile. I had a pretty big chip on my shoulder.


There were a lot of events in Washington on July 4, 1976, including the grand opening of Union Station as a National Visitors Center, and of course, a huge birthday celebration. As I recall, there were several large public events around different parts of the Mall.


The one I was there to attend was a peace and take-back-the-government rally called by the People’s Bicentennial Commission—and organized, interestingly enough, under the “Don’t Tread on Me” rattlesnake banner that we’ve seen at a lot of Tea Party events in the past few years.


Aside: Columnist Ed Tant, who covered the event for the Athens, GA Observer, remembers the flag as quite integral to the demonstration:


The People’s Bicentennial rally 34 years ago still stands out in my memory for its hopeful patriotism and its message against the predations of plutocracy symbolized by the “Don’t Tread on Me” flag flying from the stage and from the crowd more than a generation before the same flag was appropriated by the tea party crew.


The Gadsden flag was named for Christopher Gadsden, a Revolutionary War hero from South Carolina. It was flown by American sailors and marines during the revolution, but the first political group to feature the rattlesnake flag at a Washington rally was the People’s Bicentennial Commission that flew the flag to warn against the growing power of multinational corporations…


During the People’s Bicentennial rally in 1976, activist Mary Murphy explained the symbolism of the rattlesnake flag, saying, “The rattlesnake has no eyelids, so it is ever-vigilant. Also, it never attacks without warning.”


I seem to remember seeing it at many rallies over the early 1970s, but it may be that the July 4, 1976 demonstration was the first to make it the rally’s official symbol. Somewhere, I might still have my copy of that button.[Aside ends]


Although some conservatives had worried publicly that this anniversary would be a magnet for terrorism and violence, what impressed me above all was the lack of that kind of drama. Only a few years after hard-hat construction workers had attacked war protestors in New York, after Chicago police had attacked protestors at the Democratic Convention, and after the country had been split into opposing camps on so many issues—multiple large gatherings, each representing a different segment of the political landscape from ultraprogressive to ultraconservative, and a huge apolitical middle that was just there to party out on the Bicentennial, all coexisting. All peacefully listening to their own sets of speakers and performers, sometimes coming into contact with each other at the edges, and even sharing food. As far as I could tell, there was no violence, no overt conflict at all, even as hippies in torn flag t-shirts encountered flag-waving conservatives.


And then, after all the rallies were over, we all left our separate public events and gathered around the Washington Monument—to peacefully watch one of the best fireworks displays I’ve ever seen. For one magical night, there seemed to be no great divide. Just a whole lot of people watching a grand fireworks display.


Hitching out of Washington on my way west the next morning, I encountered the generosity of people from both the protests and the parties. I made it back to Yellow Springs in three rides, with very little waiting time. It took only about a half-hour longer than driving would have taken.


And that was the beginning of my summer-long lesson that most Americans are good people who want to do the right thing…that the world is abundant and people will help others when they need it…and that the hostility I thought mainstream America had felt toward the counterculture was at least in large measure, confined to my own imagination.


I have taken the lessons of that day of unity and that summer of hope with me for 35 years now, and I trace a lot of who I am today and how I act in the world to the revelations of that time.

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