Medication time. Medication time.
Medication time. Medication time.
There may be no adequate way to capture the colorless uniformity of that movement. Its adherents all dressed the same way, conducted their lives the same way, mouthed the same slogans and, in all probability, thought the same thoughts. The reaction against any deviation was horrific, amounting to ostracism. You didn't dare say a word in favor of freedom, capitalism, religion, sobriety, moral standards, or the United States.
I recall a drive mounted by the "radicals" on my college campus against the first Anti-Ballistic Missile initiative, in 1969. There was no attempt to address the merits. There was merely a lot of hysterical shouting about the warmongering madness of the Nixon regime and how it had to be stopped at all costs. That was a campaign against a purely defensive weapon system, that couldn't be used against the troops or citizens of another country under any circumstances.
"Nonconformists" lined up to sign the anti-ABM petitions in numbers that still boggle my mind. All of them in T-shirts and blue jeans, with long hair parted down the middle.
Mass movements generally are like that, because they coalesce around charismatic or overpoweringly authoritarian figures much more often than around wholesome ideas. Eric Hoffer condemned them thoroughly in The True Believer, whose relevance and penetration is no less today than it was when published, forty years ago.
We who ask only freedom might never get up a true mass movement for it, since freedom is just the political precondition for the things we actively value and individually seek. Perhaps the only way such a thing could arise is in reaction against a dictatorship -- but that's a thought I'd rather not entertain on a Monday morning.
Freedom, Wealth, and Peace,
Francis W. Porretto
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