After All These Years – Excerpt
But while anyone political group may have suffered bloody in-fights that ended in purges and seemingly endless splintering, something more basic than strategy, more basic even than ideology, united them: they saw the world, and their own lives, in political terms. Change to them meant an actual reconfiguration of power. On the other hand, to those compelled mainly by countercultural ideas-hippies, yippies, back-to-the-land utopianists-self-expression, autonomy and personal liberation were at the heart of the movement. The goal was to transcend the rules and roles of a society that labored mightily to manufacture consensus and conformity. Change was internal, a personal struggle to free oneself from the past.
The values of the two contingents may seem contradictory, but in fact, there was amazingly little tension between rank and file “freaks” and “politicos” of twenty years ago. Leaders may have espoused doctrinaire positions, but many of their followers had feet in both camps. Most underground newspapers reported on, and pledged allegiance to, both scenes. But more than that, both contingents shared some very basic beliefs: They were committed to equality, both racial and, at least after the women’s movement began to make an impact, sexual. They distrusted authority. They shared a humanitarian sense of social justice. They rooted for the underdog. They rejected what they saw as the moral and intellectual wasteland of American middle-class adulthood.