If you feel like fighting back is useless, read this.
This is a story I had not heard, but it went on just down the road from me when I was a baby.
It's a good read.
Wally J Wonder
FOR WHAT IT'S WORTH: NEVER GIVE UP
April, 1970. I remember that day so well. I was scared to death.It was one of the lowest points of my life.
There was a very small group of us, about 15 or 20, sitting on the steps of the old Student Union Building at the University of Alabama, at a protest against the War in Vietnam. One of the guys with us, Tom Terrific, picked up his guitar and started playing For What It's Worth, and we all began to sing.
But we were surrounded on two sides by a mob of about two hundred student counter-protesters, almost all short-haired males, massed along the sidewalks around us. Their faces were twisted with rage and hatred, and many were in ROTC uniforms. Over the past few minutes, the mob had doubled in size and grown noticeably more out of control.
The only thing that kept them from physically attacking us was a thin line of about 5 campus cops, who were all looking extremely nervous themselves.
Their signs said things like Give the Hippies a Haircut and Send Hippies Back to Cuba and Beautify America: Kill a Hippie, and the fact that we were singing For What It's Worth made them even more pissued off.
Their faces were bright red, and they started screaming at us at the top of their lungs. It got so loud that they drowned out what we were singing completel,. and we were all so scared that we stopped singing completely.
Then the pieces of gravel and concrete began to hit us. Luckily these pieces were not very large, because members of the mob were picking them up off the side of the road. But several of our people got hit really hard.
At that point we were all really frightened out of our minds. If the campus cops had not been there, the best thing that would have happened to us would have been terrible beatings.
But the cops were terrified too. They told us we had to leave right then, and as they escorted us down the street, past a long line of screaming people just waiting to kick our asses, we all felt completely cowed and defeated.
As we walked away from the campus, we were all so overwhelmed and scared.. We'd tried so hard for weeks to get something going, but we'd failed miserably. Our protests had been going on for weeks, but the crowds were smaller and smaller at every demonstration we planned.
Since finals and summer break were only about a month away,, we decided it'd be best to just chill out and wait until we came back in the fall to try to get things going again.
I was so depressed. Everything was over, and we had failed miserably. I went with a couple friends of mine over to their apartment, to drink some wine and smoke some reefer, and try to figure out what had gone wrong. So maybe we could do it better in the fall.
As we sat at my friend's apartment, smoking reefer and drinking wine and listening to Bob Dylan, we all talked our way around an unspoken conclusion we all had reached. The American government and American society were just just too powerful for us to do anything against at all.
As we sat there, little did we know that a major riot was in full swing at that moment on the University of Alabama campus, ironically caused by the mob of drunken hippie-hating counter-protesters that had almost kicked our asses earlier that afternoon. Or that martial law has been declared, and the Tuscaloosa Police had been called in. Or that the Tuscaloosa Police force, one half of whom at that time were card-carrying members of The United Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, had taped over their badge numbers before they came on campus, and that their specific purpose was to get on campus so that they could kick some hippie asses and bust some hippie heads.
We had no idea that by the end of that night we all three would be sitting in the Tuscaloosa City Jail along with 115 other students, most of whom had nothing to do with the war protest movement at all. Or that several of the students arrested, both male and female, would have been beaten up by the police, some with their lips split open and their eyes swollen shut, some with their heads split open by billy clubs.
And what we could never have guessed in a million years was that this police riot was the beginning of a massive protest all across the University of Alabama campus, with attendance at peace rallies numbering nearly a thousand people.
Or that our peace movement would grow so large and powerful that within one month it would shut down every major college campus in the United States, and that within two years it would force the United States to withdraw all its troops from the country of Vietnam.
For What It's Worth...
Never give up. You have no idea what your small actions make set in motion.
IIf you ever think our resistance is futile...
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