carmine@qusavx.UUCP (Carmine Scavo) (05/11/84)
[From the desk of a greying radical] From the perspective of somebody who was active in the loosely-organized, somewhat mis-leadingly named 'student movement' of the 60's, the recent discussion of the SDS is interesting. Blaming the excesses of the Weather Underground, etc. on the authors of the Port Huron Statment is akin to blaming the excesses of the Reign of Terror in Paris or the Stalinist purges in the Soviet Union on the authors of the American Declaration of Independence. After all, both the French and Russian Revolutions were DIRECT philosophical 'children' of the American Revolution. If the PHS caused anything, it helped create a feeling of hope which was later dashed. The sentiments of the PHS seem somewhat naive in the current cynical state of the American polity, however, that document caught the idealism that many people felt in the early 60's. It seems difficult for people now to recall that those actually WERE idealistic times and that many people thought that, with some changes, the US could turn out to be the type of democracy that we all were raised to believe it actually was. The later sense of outrage and deep disappointment (best, I think, described in Paul Simon's "American Song"), caused by the events of 1968 and on (the assasinations of MLK, RFK, the Dem and Rep conventions of that year, the election of the trickster, etc.) replaced the early feelings of hope and joy.