What I Saw on the Way to the Revolution

People gathered for a concert in Tompkins Square Park in 1967.
“In June 1967, in the freewheeling spirit of the times, I dropped out of Antioch College, in Ohio, and hitchhiked to New York. I was 19, mildly though not madly political. In junior high, I had joined civil rights demonstrations. Now I opposed the Vietnam War. But my ideology was simply the counterculture’s: peace and love, plus anything fun that could undermine convention. I floated into that summer in a luminous haze of artistic impulse, magical thinking and pot smoke. But by September, things were darkening. Reality — menace — began to intrude. I found a focus. I joined the staff of Students for a Democratic Society, the principal organization of the New Left; I became an organizer. By year’s end, I was calling myself a revolutionary. Two years later, I would help found the militant Weatherman group, a breakaway faction of the S.D.S. Weatherman picked ruinous sectarian fights within S.D.S., and violent street battles with the cops. Later we went underground and carried out a campaign of bombings. By then, I was no longer the gentle hippie of 1967. But it was actually during 1967 that I changed. I had come to New York with a notion to get into theater — to be a stage manager or lighting designer, an actor or dancer. I took some classes, participated in some workshop productions. I crashed with a friend on East 11th Street, between Avenues B and C. …”
NY Times