Festival of Life
Do you know the way to San Diego, Jose?
(What you're about to read is being run because, we think, it's just about as outrageous as its alternative. We've heard rumblings about going to San Diego [or Miami) for almost a year now and in that year we've been forced to consider just what such an action would mean.
As far as we can tell, demonstrations in San Deigo this summer would be to the 1968 demonstrations in Chicago just wbat Altamont was to Woodstock. You can't recreate an event once it's assumed mythic proportions and any attempt to do so is evidence of either a lack of imagination or even worse, a lack of thought about just what the original event meant.
'60s political strategies are not going to work in the politics of the ‘60s. Mass demonstrations — for all that they accomplished in the last decade — are precisely *60s politics.
The Festival of Life in Chicago was an idea whose time had come. It was the last great demonstration of the era; each and every one after that resulted in some kind of death, because the government bad decided that the best way to treat mass marches was militaristic ally.