VOLUME 2, ISSUE 4 | JANUARY 2008
By CHARLES DEGELMAN
Political activist Mark Rudd has been bucking the system since the 1960s. This veteran of the war at home has tried it all, from non-violence to armed resistance, from high-profile demonstration to underground flight, with plenty of reflection in between. In the battle for social justice, Mark Rudd is experienced. But experience does not always prepare one for the future … or the present.
After “growing up absurd”[1] in middle-class New Jersey, Rudd attended Columbia University, where he joined a vibrant new political-action group called Students for a Democratic Society. As the blowback from the Vietnam war touched down on American campuses, a radicalized Rudd helped shut down Columbia University for its complicity with the war machine.
Along with thousands of other activists, Rudd fought and lost the bloody struggle to persuade timid Democratic candidates to add an antiwar plank to their 1968 presidential election platform.
By 1969, Rudd and many of his compatriots had reached the boiling point. They had tried everything: strikes, boycotts, protests, demonstrations, mass arrests, street theater, courtroom drama, even party politics … but to what end?
The war in Vietnam raged on; urban ghettos ignited … again. While astronauts danced on the moon, poverty still dominated the “other” America. Despite their protestations, women – even in the Movement – continued to be treated as second-class citizens.
Angry and frustrated, Rudd and a small group of hard-liners threw out a challenge to their brothers and sisters in SDS and the broader New Left movement: Drop the burnt-out tactics of non-violence and civil disobedience. It was time to move forward – quickly, and by any means necessary.
Rudd and his compatriots decided to move from protest and arrest to resistance and armed struggle. First dubbed Weatherman[2], this revolutionary guerrilla group broke into isolated cells that planted and detonated dozens of bombs in federal buildings, courthouses, and war-research laboratories nationwide.
They eluded a top-priority program (CointelPro) set up by the FBI to destroy the Weather Underground and the Black Panther party. Rudd remained a federal fugitive until 1977.
Today, Mark Rudd has resumed his role as an out-front political activist. An adamant advocate of non-violent, civil disobedience, he often prefaces calls to action with comparisons to the political movements of the 1960s. “What’s hard to understand,” he writes in a 2005 Los Angeles Times op-ed piece, “is why the antiwar movement isn’t further along than it is … “
“The antiwar movement,” he wrote in 2007, “has hit a plateau since the [Iraq] war began in 2003 …. Nor is there a countercultural movement today that questions authority like the one that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s.”
Rudd may be justified in comparing the present with the past. Many of us remember the energy, intensity, and change fomented by 1960s political activism. It was real. It came from the heart, made sense, and blew people’s minds. It was in your face.
Where are the demos today? Where are slogans and the freaks in the street? Where is the loud, crazy energy of resistance, rebellion, and revolution that permeated those times? Considering the state of the nation today, a return to the passionate, outlandish tactics of the 1960s might serve as an antidote to the current decline and fall of just about everything.
“If all of us ‘gray-hairs’ were to tell our stories,” Rudd wrote in 2005, “we might be able to … help people find hope in this dark time.” A noble sentiment from a dedicated 1960s warrior. However …
The past, although connected, does not necessarily bear comparison with the present.
The radical political movements of the 1960s were top-down movements.[3] Anti-war, feminist, and early save-our-planet campaigns were largely developed by educated, campus-based activists whose principal goal was to bring the word to the people. Believing that knowledge is power, they preached the evils of capitalism, imperialism, racism, sexism, and the abuse of social justice, hoping the word they spread would translate into mass action.
There were successes. The New Left, the politicos, the freaks — however you wish to characterize them — brought about positive change for minorities and women, the environment, our health and welfare, even our spirits.
In the end, however, the top-down New Left of the 1960s was unable to create lasting connections to Middle America, the poor, the disenfranchised, and most minorities. In short, our movement, the movement that Mark Rudd uses as a call to action, suffered from isolation.
Today a new political movement is alive and growing — from a different direction. New American “radicals” operate from painful duress and dire necessity; they are the people hit hardest by the war in Iraq and global warming. They are the folks denied access to a decent education, affordable housing, effective healthcare, or a meaningful culture. Social change coming from the downtrodden? Sound naïve? Bleak? Hopeless? Hardly. Because those people are us. All of us.
As it shakes, rattles, and rolls through its first decade, the new American century is rattling everyone’s cage. Even the middle class is recognizing that, during crisis, people can respond quickly, resolutely, and collectively across race, gender, culture, and class, without being organized or “taught.” As with the radicals and hippies of the 1960s, Americans today can resonate to Bob Dylan’s universal lyric: “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”
Ain’t Gonna Study War No More
During the Vietnam war, parents who went through World War II often expected their baby-boomer children to defend democracy against communism just as dad and often mom had fought “the good fight” against fascism in Europe, Africa, and the Pacific. Most Vietnam-era kids didn’t go for it.
For many of today’s “old folks,” the blundering tragedy of Vietnam still burns in their memories. They’re urging their kids and grandkids to stay the hell away from the military and Iraq.
Antiwar sentiment has spread far beyond its usual haunts on campuses and coastal cities. Edward Luce, Washington bureau chief of London’s Financial Times, points out that “white, small-town America pays the price in Iraq.” Combat soldiers are overwhelmingly from small towns in the Midwest and the South. South Dakota leads the list of Iraq war casualties per capita, with Nebraska and Louisiana coming next.
After suffering the loss or prolonged absence of family members and workers who have been ordered on second and third tours of duty, nobody needs to prompt middle-Americans to shout: “Hell, no, we won’t go.” They aren’t going. Last June (2007), the U.S. Army missed its recruiting goals by 16 percent.
In addition, a nationwide CBS/Times poll found that 55 percent of all Americans describe Operation Iraqi Freedom as “a disaster.” Fifty-nine percent of those polled want Americans to “leave Iraq immediately,” while 62 percent would choose to “finance paying for the rebuilding of the [U.S.] Gulf Coast by cutting spending in Iraq.”
Without ever attending a demonstration or a teach-in, Americans know that we are not fighting “the good fight” in Iraq any more than we were in Vietnam.
Fossil Fuel and Treehuggers
Counter-cultural movements of the late 1960s began to regard planet Earth as a living entity through the re-“discovery” of Native-American cultures. Environmental awareness spread quickly, with 20 million demonstrators participating in the first Earth Day (1970).
In the decades that followed, environmental awareness and activism remained in the hands of the counterculture and those Americans who could afford earth-friendly consumption and recycling. Environmental concerns and public-policy initiatives were often overshadowed by the demand for jobs and the momentum of the still-booming American industrial economy.
“Tree huggers,” a phrase coined for Ronald Reagan by his scriptwriters, was seconded only by his observation that “… You’ve seen one redwood, you’ve seen ’em all.”
Jobs-first pragmatism and cavalier attitudes toward the fragility of the planet allowed Americans to ignore symptoms of pollution and global warming until the end of the century. In 2001 a University of Illinois study concluded that the United States was “among the most [environmentally] misinformed of the developed nations surveyed.” The same study found that only 15 percent of those questioned could identify the burning of fossil fuels as the primary cause of global warming.
Today – despite governmental tinkering with scientific data and a timid, non-committal media – Americans are being forced to recognize the causes and consequences of two centuries of industrialization.
A Zogby poll, conducted a year after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, found that 70 percent of respondents believed “global warming was having … a major effect on weather extremes.” The same poll found that “personal experience has convinced the American people that climate change is occurring.”
When mega tornadoes, supercharged hurricanes, and abnormal flooding descend on whole communities, global warming can’t be ignored or shoved under the media carpet. As with the war in Iraq, personal experience has led to political awareness. People want their children to inherit a green planet.
Our Bodies, Ourselves
First published in 1973, Our Bodies, Ourselves was written by a collective of Boston-based healthcare professionals and political activists. This ground-breaking book by and about women arose out of a recognized need for women to take control of their bodies and their healthcare in a medical system largely dominated by men and male values.
Today’s healthcare climate is vastly different from the days when Our Bodies, Ourselves covered new territory and sat on nearly every counterculture bookshelf in the nation.
Neglect and incompetence in the health system no longer happens to the other guy. Increased cancer rates, the rise in childhood asthma, inadequate healthcare, and a shortfall in medical insurance is (again, in Bob Dylan’s words) “bringin’ it all back home” for men and women, the young and the elderly. Even the wealthy have been victimized by the failure of the American healthcare system.
More than 46 million Americans lack health insurance — up from 39 million in 1993. Catastrophic health issues can foreshadow bankruptcy, even in the employed middle class. It’s little wonder that Americans consider health care the most critical domestic- policy issue going today.
A recent ABC News/Washington Post poll found that 63 percent of Americans disapprove of the way the government handles health care. And contrary to modern mythology, Americans do care: 76 percent of insured Americans believe it is “unacceptable” that millions are stranded without health insurance; 55 percent of those polled would prefer a government-funded program over the existing privatized snarl.
In contrast to the era that spawned Our Bodies, Ourselves, no one had to teach Americans that there is a crisis in healthcare; they are experiencing it themselves.
Huelga!
In the 1950s, America saw the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott render segregated public transportation unconstitutional. In the 1960s and ’70s, the word Huelga!, or strike, became a rallying cry when the United Farm Workers launched a five-year boycott of table grapes. The boycott led to new contracts with major growers and set protective precedents for field laborers everywhere.
Today, America is undergoing a new boycott, perhaps the most tragic yet effective holdout we have ever experienced. The current embargo doesn’t come at the hands of revolutionaries. It wasn’t led by charismatic leaders like Mahatma Gandhi, Dolores Huerta, or Cesar Chavez.
Over the past two years, with painful but steadily mounting momentum, the American middle and working classes began smashing the global credit system – by default.
Barbara Ehrenreich, journalist, columnist, author, and social critic observed that “this may be the first case in history in which the downtrodden manage to bring down an unfair economic system without going to the trouble of a revolution.”
Ms. Ehrenreich is referring to those of us with the nerve to seek the security of owning a home without being “able” to afford one. As the housing market ballooned, clever mortgage companies began to offer tempting, de-regulated “sub-prime” loans to hungry buyers with shaky income and no equity. Acting without legal or financial counsel, people grasped for a piece of the American Dream, signing up for delicious-sounding homeowner deals.
But if the banks are made of marble, their contracts are full of fine print. As interests rates flared, many working- and middle-class “homeowners” found that their loans had turned to financial quicksand. Families with limited incomes (conveniently overlooked by the lenders) were unable to keep step with massive rate increases that built up as rates “adjusted” skyward and late-pay penalties kicked in. Homeowners defaulted; lenders foreclosed. However …
Foreclosures do not cover debt burdens. Sub-prime companies, carrying defaulting clients in overwhelming numbers, were unable to pay off debt markers to the more “legitimate” money handlers up the loan chain.
The sub-prime loan community was trapped in a quagmire as debilitating as the war in Iraq. Foreclosures mounted, personal heartbreak and family tragedy abounded, and government-sponsored real-estate lenders like Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and Countrywide Financial Corp., the nation’s largest mortgage lender, all reported losses in the billions.
At the same time American consumers stopped buying. Both Wal-Mart and Home Depot have announced steadily dropping quarterly profits, plunging the consumer-based stock market into the economic equivalent of an ice-cap meltdown. H. Lee Scott, CEO of the low-wage Wal-Mart empire, admitted “it’s no secret that many customers are running out of money at the end of the month.”
What do Americans do when they run out of money? They turn to their credit cards. Now, without equity in their homes, many have been unable to buy off bloated credit- card debts. According to investigative journalist Danny Schecter, three hundred million Americans live beneath $3,000,000,000,000 – that’s three trillion dollars – worth of debt. Boil it down, you’ll discover that the average U.S. household now carries a credit-card balance of $30,000 ... apiece.
America Then — and Now
An unwinable war, global warming, inadequate healthcare, and a teetering economy all conspire to paint a different America than the one tackled by the baby-boom generation. During the 1960s, America straddled the planet like a colossus, indisputably the world’s leader in industry, banking, per capita wealth, health, science, and education.
Thanks to the power of our postwar hegemony, Americans were numbed by conformity, seduced by Mickey Mouse, and tucked in with lullabies of liberty and justice for all. By the 1960s it had grown agonizingly clear that the United States was sleep walking while it was being torn apart by a costly Cold War, anti-Communist hysteria, economic schizophrenia, and gender and racial conflict. Wake up, America, became a critical battle cry.
Today, America leads no one. We are no longer a producer nation; we are a nation of consumers. Banking, like industry, has sailed away on the flowing tide, and frontiers in science and technology are explored elsewhere. We rank 34th in infant-mortality rates, and don’t even appear on the Richter scale of quality education.
Today, Americans are waking up. Not just the poor and downtrodden. All of us. And we don’t need to be told by Stephen Stills and Buffalo Springfield that “… somethin’s happenin’ here.”
Americans are, in the words of scriptwriter and social prophet Paddy Chayevsky, “mad as hell, and we’re not gonna take it anymore.” Stay tuned, Mark Rudd and the rest of us 1960s “gray hairs.” Once again, “the times, they are a-changin’.”
Charles Degelman is a writer and editor living in Los Angeles.
Notes:
[1] Growing Up Absurd: Sociologist Paul Goodman’s study about adolescence described 1950s and ‘60s Western society as “a paradise of consumerism,” a “confused, seduced, spoiled mass society” that “destroys the dreams of youth.”
[2] Weatherman quickly changed its name to the Weather Underground to recognize that women were as integral to the Movement as men.
[3] The civil-rights movement was an exception.
How to:
Military Families Against The War www.mfso.org
People opposed to the war in Iraq who have relatives or loved ones currently in the military or who have served in the military since the buildup to the Iraq war. “Civilians” welcome.
Save Our Environment
www.saveourenvironment.org
A collaborative effort of the nation’s most influential environmental advocacy organizations dedicated to “increasing public awareness and supporting activism on today’s most important environmental issues.”
Health Care Reform
michaelmoore.com/sicko
Popular, populist documentarian Michael Moore (Sicko, Farenheit 9/11, Bowling for Columbine) has assembled an online resource for health care reform featuring relevant facts and figures, breaking news, and an impressive list of health care reform organizations.
Americans for Debt Relief Now www.stopthesqueeze.org
Organized by investigative journalist Danny Schecter, this collaboration among like-minded organizations is “dedicated to alleviating the debt burden on American families and raising awareness about the consumer debt issue.”
Students for a Democratic Society www.studentsforademocraticsociety.org
A contemporary association of young people on the left seeking to “create a sustained community of educational and political concern uniting activists and scholars, students and faculty.” Includes 1960s-era SDS history, photos, and primary-source material.
Mark Rudd’s Web Site
www.markrudd.com
Check out what an activist “then” is doing “now” to buck the system.
Tom Hayden’s Website
www.tomhayden.com
Since he helped found SDS, Tom Hayden remains a leading voice for activism. Check out his Web site.
Charles Degelman http://www.charlesdegelman.org is a writer and editor living in Los Angeles.
