Right, Left and Centre: Part Seven; The Lady That Moved From Left to Right. by Dave Jaffe

   The Lady That Moved From Left to Right; by Dave Jaffe. Part Seven


   "We had fun," Mary Anne Burns said about some of her actions in the late 1960's and early 1970's. This fun included about three dozen yippies invading the United States border town of Blaine, Washington. This was a counterattack against the U.S. invasion of Cambodia in the spring of 1970.
     The yippies had been founded by Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman in New York City in late 1967.  The yippies combined the hippie lifestyle with left wing politics. The yippies of B.C. were political rebels who often lived in what were called 'crash pads'. Here sometimes a dozen or more young people lived in old homes and shared things in common.
    They smoked marijuana in the open, played loud rock music by people like Bob Dylan, Chilliwack, Mock Duck, the Jefferson Airplane and the Beatles. Men and women paired off usually without marrying. Man and women grew their hair long and the men often grew long beards. All wore very casual dress like jeans and T-Shirts. Many hippies lived in Kitsilano, the west side area that sat on the south edge of the Burrard Inlet. The yippies read 'The I Ching'. Yet some of the yippies also looked through works by Mao Tse Tung, Pierre Vallieres, Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, and other revolutionary authors.
    At one time yippies broke into the American consulate and siezed the American Eagle from the embassy's wall. "We carried it outside," one yippie recalled. "To us it was a symbol of all that was wrong in the world. You see we were revolutionaries."
    Yet the revolution never came, at least not in Canada. Apart from Quebec, Canada is a very conservative country.  And governments noticed the yippies and started to deal with them. "How do you move a donkey?" one saying went. "It's quite simple. You just use the carrot and the stick." The Trudeau government brought in locally controlled Local Initiatives Projects and Opportunity for Youth Programs to quiet the demonstrators with jobs. That was the carrot. Then the Vancouver Police rioted in the summer of 1971 and beat up hippies and yippies who were demonstrating against anti-marijuana laws. This was the stick.
     Then came the economic downturn of the 1970's. Two massive oil price hikes in the 1970's ground the economy to a halt and now even yippies started to worry about their future. The same thing happened to Trotskyists, Communists and Maoists who were the rivals of the yippies in the streets of Vancouver. "Children get older," sang Fleetwood Mac. So did all these groups. They began to marry, raise children and get jobs. By 1975, the New Left, which was basically a youth movement, was history. Still, it did help change Canada, freeing it up in so many ways. Casual dress, casual drugs, casual sex and eastern religions for a time became the new orthodoxy.
      History moved along and so did Mary Anne Burns. She and Ken split up and Mary Anne moved rightward. She took up with another man who was active in the bus drivers' union. She hung out with New Democrats for a while.  Later in the 1970's, her father, a mining engineer made a big mineral discovery in central America. Mary Anne now had a rich father. She headed east to Toronto and took a law degree at the University of Toronto.
     She ended up working in a Bay Street law firm and married another lawyer. The days of running with the yippies were now far behind her.