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| You don't need a Weatherman to tell which way the wind blows... |
I've heard about the "Weather Underground" film done by Sam Green for KQED in San Francisco for a decade now, but until yesterday, I hadn't seen the whole thing. Well... (I recently signed up to Snag Films on the internet, where "Weather Underground" and a number of other films and documentaries I've wanted to see are available free but not without commercial interruptions... like with some of the other online film services you have to turn off your adblock software for the duration.)
Memories... I wasn't part of SDS or the Weather Underground back in the day, and by 1969 I was becoming somewhat more socialized to a standard adult lifestyle though hardly as a member of the bourgeoisie.
The rebel in me would not permit that.
Though I wasn't part of the Revolution by 1969, I followed SDS and Weather Underground more than casually, them and the Black Panthers and American Indian Movement and so many others who actually engaged in a kind of Revolution as the '60's got going and then petered out, slip-sliding through pools of blood and misery right here at home. Not quite on the scale of Vietnam, no, not even close to that scale, but the bloodshed here at home had a profound effect on the counterculture.
Let it be said and let it be known.
What hasn't been explored, however, is how the bloodshed here at home affected the Establishment, because it most profoundly did. We who were not Establishment rarely look at things from the other side, so it can be difficult to grasp and gauge what kind of effects the radicals and the revolutionaries were having in real time, and it's still difficult to understand how those effects have played out since then.
Sam Green's film doesn't directly explore the question of how the radicals and revolutionaries affected the Establishment, either, and Mark Rudd, Todd Gitlin and others interviewed essentially declare that the Revolution was a failure and leave it at that -- as they go back, with a big sigh, to their sinecures in various academic settings and NPOs.
Oh. Yes. Wasn't it all such a very big waste in the end?
