Word: sds
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...humanist outrage, however estheticalily attractive, was helpless against this system. The explosion of the Northern Ghettoes was a shock to students who had risked their lives by working in the South. Apparently you could risk your life much closer to home if you wanted to. And by 1965, when SDS began to be an important part of the Movement, students had to explain the War. More than anything else the War made radicals not only because it brought the ssytem close to the lives of students, but because it demanded explanation. There is a great need on the left...
...ONLY thing safe to say about SDS these days is that none of its variations has much in common with the SDS that drafted the "Port Haron Statement" in 1962. That was a group of disaffected students and intellectuals, alienated both from the American dream and the pedantic Old Left squabbles their parents had engaged in thirty years before. Led by Tom Hayden and Al Haber, these children of Hiroshima and Coca-Cola nurtured on Paul Goodman hoped to forge a "New Left" that would revive radical politics after the critical somnolence of the fifties...
...would certainly not consider them very radical today. According to its constitution. SDS sought "to create a sustained community of educational and political concern: one bringing together liberals and radicals, activists and scholars, students and faculty. It maintains a vision of a democratic society, where at all levels the people have control of the decisions which affect them and the resources on which they are dependent. . . . It is civil libertarian in its treatment of those with whom it disagrees, but clear in its opposition to any anti democratic principle as a basis for governmental, social or political organization...
...early days everything was politics. Pot was politics. Peace was politics. Black and white marching together was politics. Saving NO was politics. And wanting to control your own life was the most important politics of all. Controlling your own life remained the theme of SDS activity for a number of years. Mario Savio, leader of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, summed it up best...
...SDS's days of community organizing and its brief flirtation with student power gave way to draft resistance and anti-war marches. Of course the transition was not so abrupt-at first students were against the War because the Vietnamese should have the right to control the decisions that affect them. But gradually a more coherent and unsettling analysis of American politics emerged...