Tag: Students for a Democratic Society

I would imagine anyone under the age of 40 hasn’t bothered to read the Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society, 1962 .  I submit it’s worth a quick read.

Much of the document is outdated, much of it is naive, some of it is foolish, but there’s some meat there and a ‘sense’ that, I think, is too often missing from Left Wing discussion today: Hope.  Hope in what people could do for themselves when they got off their asses and did it.  Hope that is summed-up in the old New Left saying, “Have a little patience.  Have a little faith.”   And I’ll point-out it was when the New Left lost its patience, rejected faith for turgid authoritarian Old Left dogmas that it dwindled into irrelevance.

Anyway, take ten minutes, or so & read the thing.  At worst you’ll get a smug sense of superiority over those dummies who wrote the thing; at best you’ll learn something.

Before they were washed up, I “palled around with some terrorists,” including Weather Underground leader David Gilbert, a close friend and comrade of Bernadine Dorhn and Bill Ayers, whose limited association with Barack Obama has been unsuccessfully used for an election-tipping cudgel for months.

So close a friend was Gilbert, in fact, that Ayers and Dorhn raised his son after he and the boy’s mother, Kathy Boudin, were imprisoned for the robbery of a Brinks armored truck and the killing of a security guard and two policemen in Nanuet and Nyack, New York, on October 20, 1981. Before he chose the general course of action that landed him permanently in the slam, I lived with Gilbert in Denver for more than a year. I’ll get to back that.