I’m not sure where I picked this up today, but wherever it was, thanks for bringing it to my attention.
Yeah, the 70s. It wasn’t all leisure suits and bad music. This long read brings back to my conscious memory many of the things that went on in my teenage years that I had forgotten-SDS, Weatherman, Puerto Rican seperatists, the Black Panthers and all of that crappy stuff. Airline hijackings to Cuba, bombs in NYC, Patty Hearst–the list seems endless and all bad.
Honestly, I’m guilty of over-romanticizing the 70s, and this makes me remember what a pulsating smelly ball of shit it really was. Where I lived I was mostly protected from the worst of it, and if I hadn’t been, I would have been toast. I wasn’t the smartest kid in the world in terms of street smarts back then. That took another decade to learn.
The takeaway from this long essay is how would a civil war start and what would it look like as each stage kicks off. You start with the fools we see in the streets now and you end with Godzilla’s Trudging Zone.
The book that I stole the title of this post from? If you’re not old enough to remember all this, you might want to read it. If you’re old enough to remember it all, you probably still want to read it. Know your enemy.
"Leary was in minimum security and Newton was in max and WELP (Newton was free soon, anyway)."
My google-fu is weak. WELP?
BTW, thanks for bringing this up. Some historical perspective never hurts.
IIRC, one of the UW bomber guys has been quietly running a local food cart (ice cream? I forget) for years. He seems to have mellowed quite a bit.