Ends and Odds: The Ravings Of An Old Man by Dave Jaffe: Two Cheers For The Hiippies - Part Three by Dave Jaffe

    Two Cheers For The Hippies by Dave Jaffe: Part Three




       " Peace and Love' may have been the motto of many hippies. Yet there were dangerous moments in the hippie world too. Bikers often visited the hippie world and bullied these young people. Some of the young  people were strung out on amphetamines or crashed after bad acid trips. Free clinics staffed by volunteers sprung up to help the injured and sick people.
     Meanwhile the great rebellions of the late 1960's provoked a reaction from conservatives. Police and National Guard people shot and killed more than 160 people in the riots that erupted after Martin Luther King Junior was killed in 1968. Police attacked demonstrators and others who came to Chicago in 1968 to protest outside the Democratic Convention. Then police raided the headquarters of Black Panthers across America in 1969 and shot and killed Fred Hampton in Chicago.
      In Berkeley California students and street people clashed with police forces in the summer of 1969 as the young people tried to defend "People's Park' from the local government. The National Guard killed four student demonstrators at Kent State University in the spring of 1970  and three students at Jackson State University. These students and tens of thousands of others were protesting the American invasion of Cambodia.
     "Just watch me," Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau told t.v. reporter Tim Ralfe in the fall of 1970 when Ralfe asked the p.m. how far he would go to suppress the terrorism  of the Front de Liberation de Quebec or the F.L.Q. In the wake of two F.L.Q. kidnappings and one murder, Trudeau announced a War Measures Act in October1970 that embraced the whole of Canada. Hundreds of people had their homes searched and many ended up in prison for a few weeks undergoing interrogation by police.
      The cadres of the F.L.Q. like many other hard core left wingers scorned the hippies. Francois Simard a former F.L.Q.'er wrote a book on his political journey into and out of terrorism. In his memoir Simard trashed the hippies. Another man but this time from the richest one per cent  swung to the right in the wake of the rebellions of the 1960's.
   Nelson Rockefeller, the ultra-rich governor of New York State or"Rocky" as Rockefeller was known, had at one time supported single payer medicare  and a woman's right to an abortion. .He had also voted to build a state wide system of hospitals and a number of universities. In Albany which was  the state's capital, massive buildings went up that helped grow support for Rockefeller among the unionized members of the building trade unions. Now prisoners in the state prison at Attica rebelled in 1971 and seized guards as  hostages.
      The prisoners invited journalists and political activists onto prison grounds. "You're doing a great job buddy," Rockefeller told journalist Tom Wicker who phoned the governor and pleaded with him to come to Attica to defuse the rebellion. Instead Rockefeller sent armed forces and police to Attica. The police and others shot and killed three guards and dozens of prisoners. The Attica uprising was the last rebellion of the 1960's and 1970's and it was crushed.
     Then a few years later Rockefeller brought in a sweeping anti-drug law that sent thousands of
   young mostly African-American men to prison. This law was a precursor of President Bill Clinton's 'Three Strikes And You're Out' law that swelled the ranks of prisoners across America in the 1990's and beyond. In any case the era of liberalism that helped fuel the number of hippies and an era of liberalism in the U.S.A. was coming to an end.