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From: carmine@qusavx.UUCP (Carmine Scavo)
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: participative democracy and all that
Message-ID: <179@qusavx.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 11-May-84 14:40:12 EDT
Article-I.D.: qusavx.179
Posted: Fri May 11 14:40:12 1984
Date-Received: Sun, 13-May-84 08:55:13 EDT
Organization: Quantime Corp., Cincinnati, Ohio
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   [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.