"Waitin' For The People"

Oh, I’m waitin’ for the people to strike at my foes
And I’m hopin’ that the students will change the world well
So in our parks we’ll dance
And on our streets we’ll kiss.

And I’m down on professors who try to put me down
And I think it’s so stupid to always strut around
Just give me some peace to play
And someone to love today.

Their careers are wastelands, they live selfishly
I’m working to make ideals realities
As long as one baby is murdered
To bull-shit in class is wrong.

And down with all artists who have no concern
For people who are starved by Amerika
I ain’t no poet or singer
I’m just a rebel bored worker.


To listen to "Waitin' For The People" folk song, you can click on following music site link:

http://www.last.fm/music/Bob+A.+Feldman/Protest+Folk+Songs/Waiting+for+the+People

This protest folk song was written in a Bronx slum apartment between October 1970 and July 1971.

Next: IDA’s 21st-Century Weapons Research Work

Kunstler And The '60s

In My Life As A Radical Lawyer, the now-deceased William Kunstler summarized some lessons of the 1960s:

“Looking back, I realize that the individuals and groups that protested and dissented were all part of one enormous struggle against evil…

“During that decade, we made great strides in civil rights, checking the power of government, and all human rights. But we have to keep working not to lose ground and to continue gaining. If we don’t fight, evil will win…We certainly can’t trust the government to protect us. This is because the American judiciary, from the Supreme Court on down, and the rest of the system are not friends of the people…

“The struggle continues today, although more subtly than in the ‘60s…

“If the ‘60s taught me anything, from the South in the early years to Chicago in 1969 and after, it is that those with power will never quit, that the Establishment will not rest until it roots out and destroys all opposition.”

In concluding his 1994 autobiography, Kunstler observed that “I would like to be remembered as someone who did what I wanted to do with my life, who did it with some other end in view than the mere acquisition of tangible, material goods, who had some effect on the lives of people that I touched” and “who contributed…to the holding on to whatever rights and liberties are still available to Americans.”

(Downtown 9/20/95)

Next: Waitin’ For The People lyrics

MIT's War Research In 2007

Besides being represented on the Pentagon’s Institute for Defense Analyses [IDA] weapons research think-tank board of trustees by two Massachusetts Institute of Technology [MIT] professors, MIT also continues to do war research for the U.S. war machine in 2007. As Bryan Bender noted in a February 27, 2006 article on the Boston Globe’s http://www.boston.com/ site, which was headlined “Pentagon to invest $3 million in MIT bomb research,” the Pentagon is “staking a $3 million investment on a small team of Massachusetts Institute of Technology students to help the military.”

The MIT war research project is being led by MIT chemistry professor Keith A. Nelson and funded by the Pentagon’s Office of Naval Research. The goal of MIT Professor Nelson’s research project is “to pinpoint how the so-called improvised explosive devices—known as IEDs—work and find techniques to detonate or short-circuit them” by “studying the molecular composition of explosive materials,” according to the Boston Globe article.

In his February 27, 2006 article, Bryan Bender also reported that the Pentagon “believes the highly controlled experiments underway at MIT and two research partners—Washington State University and Michigan Tech—have significant promise to bear results” and that “the funding is part of a military program, called the Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative.” IEDs, according to the Globe, “pose one of the most nettlesome problems” for the Pentagon troops that have still not been withdrawn from occupied Iraq by the U.S. Establishment’s Bush Administration.

Since the Bush Administration began its military occupation of Iraq in 2003, the value of MIT’s Pentagon war research contracts has jumped from $300 million to over $500 million.

Next: Kunstler And The ‘60s

Shifting Gears

Shifting Gears

Now that I’ve finished posting Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories on this blog, I’m going to shift gears a little. I’ll be posting more information about recent Institute for Defense Analyses [IDA] weapons research projects and examples of how U.S. universities collaborate with the U.S. war machine in the 21st-century. I’ll also be posting alternative current news about Columbia University.

Since 1970, I’ve written many protest folks songs, so I’ll also be posting the lyrics to some of these songs from time to time on this blog.

Finally, I’ll be posting (when they still seem relevant) some of the column items and articles that I wrote between 1990 and 1997 for the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative newsweekly Downtown that you may have missed.

Next: MIT’s War Research In 2007

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Epilogue: From Berkeley To Kent State

Epilogue: Columbia SDS Memories: From Berkeley To Kent State

From news of the Berkeley revolt to the Columbia revolt to news of Ted’s death to news of Kent State in less than 6 years. Within these years are my Columbia SDS memories. Freedom Now and World Peace and Equality had not been won yet. And the 1960s had still not brought me the sustained romantic love relationship I had hoped to discover with Rona in 1965. But I had learned the truth about U.S. society and I felt that I was one of its un-indicted outlaws, in some ways.

The time between the Berkeley Student Revolt and the Kent State Massacre had revealed why a Revolution was necessary in the United States for a genuinely democratic society to be established within its borders. The test of the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 21st-century was whether my generation could collectively make that Revolution happen, despite the intensified repression that the U.S. imperialist Establishment appeared willing to lay on us, in order to try to turn us into docile, but cheerful, robots—as we aged.

Seize their TV
Then speak freely.

Turn 2008 into 1968.

All Power to the People!

THE END

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 27: The Bronx and Kent State, 1970

Chapter 27: The Bronx and Kent State, 1970

I decided to finally get a 9-to-5 clerical job to secure the bread needed to get a cheap apartment in this post-draft period of my life. I went to the New York State Employment Agency and it referred me to Cardinal Export Company, which sold RCA vinyl records around the globe. I was hired by a guy named Mr. Lerner to be a biller-typist. It turned out that Mr. Lerner was an ex-Communist Party member from the 1930s, now in his late 50s, who now lived in Great Neck.

Once I was getting my $100 per week in wages, I traveled up to the Bronx because that was where the cheapest apartments were being advertised, after I had decided that I didn’t want to move into a vacant apartment off Avenue D on the Lower East Side which I had been offered. In the Bronx, I found myself a 2 ½ room apartment a few blocks from Fordham University, south of Fordham Road, in a working-class Italian-American enclave. The rent-controlled apartment’s rent was $57 per month.

Before I moved from the Lower East Side to the Bronx, I spent an evening smoking pot with Melvin, in his Lower East Side apartment. Melvin had dropped out of Columbia a year before the 1968 student revolt, become one of the weirdest-looking Movement freaks in the City long before other white New Leftists became freaks and been one of Newsreel’s founders in late 1967. But in early 1970 Melvin had been pushed out of Newsreel for being “too anarchistic.” Yet Melvin had always been a very emotional, very enthusiastic and very “up” person.

I asked Melvin what he thought was happening in Newsreel, in particular, and to the New York City Movement, in general, these days. Melvin laughed and replied: “Uptight, bureaucratic people have taken over Newsreel and the Movement nowadays. Freaks don’t feel comfortable with Movement people anymore. People like us have to develop alternatives to what remains of the Movement.”

April 1970 was spent by me being bored with my 9-to-5 clerical job, painting my apartment in the Bronx and trying to recover from my heartbreak at not being loved in return by Florrie. At first, I felt an identity crisis, because for so many years I had always done New Left activist work on a daily basis, but now most evenings and weekends were free of day-to-day political activism. Once I began to get back into folk songwriting, folk singing and guitar-playing again, however, I felt my identity crisis was being resolved. I also went to an early April “Free The Panther 21” rally in Central Park and march across the Queensboro Bridge to the Long Island City Jail (in which some Black Panther Party activists were locked up) which Lew had organized, and which was attended by thousands of people.

Then Nixon announced the invasion of Cambodia on April 30, 1970—2 years after the cops had invaded Columbia University’s campus. The following day, I left early Friday afternoon from work and took the New Haven Railroad up to New Haven to attend a “Free The Panthers” May Day rally on the New Haven Green. Yale University President Brewster had diluted the potential militancy of the protest by making Yale University campus facilities available to pro-Panther demonstrators and expressing doubt that Bobby Seale could get a fair trial in the United States in 1970. National Guardsmen, though, were still walking around the city streets, just in case mass militancy developed. That night, demonstrators ended up being tear-gassed, as we attempted to march around the downtown area, in front of the New Haven Courthouse. Early Saturday morning, I got bored walking around stoned and inhaling all the tear gas that was still in the air, so I took a train back down to New York City.

The following Monday, when I left work and was heading downtown to visit my sister, I saw the headlines about the Kent State Massacre. Four white students had been killed by Ohio National Guardsmen. Like everybody else, I was both angered and somewhat surprised. I had still thought the Establishment was reluctant to shoot down white anti-war demonstrators. It now appeared it wasn’t. I looked forward to the emergency demonstration in Washington, D.C. that was immediately scheduled for the weekend and I expected that the Saturday demo would be militant.

News of the Kent State Massacre ignited campuses all across the U.S. and the U.S. mass media publicized Movement resistance in a big way. Local high school students in the Bronx spontaneously walked out of school for the first time and chanted: “One, two, three, four! We don’t want your fuckin’ war!” As the big national Saturday demo in D.C. approached, it appeared that we might be on the verge of Revolution in the U.S., analogous to what had happened in France in May 1968, less than two years before.

My sister and I hitched down to D.C. on Saturday and we were given a ride by an older anti-war guy, who was a public high school teacher. But when I got to the demo of 200,000, it seemed more like a picnic than a militant anti-war and anti-repression protest. Bureaucratic Movement people and left-liberal Movement marshals were against encouraging any kind of spontaneous mass non-violent civil disobedience to protest the Kent State killings. No Weatherpeople appeared to be around to organize any effective non-violent militancy, outside of the legalistic protest that we had all been channeled into.

In a car on the way back to New York City, I felt that the Movement, as a result of its unwillingness to collectively organize mass non-violent civil disobedience outside the White House to protest both the Kent State killings and the invasion of Cambodia, had made a major tactical blunder. A few days later two African-American students were killed by police on the campus of Jackson State in Mississippi, but the corporate media gave it much less publicity than it had given the killing of white students at Kent State in Ohio.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 26: Uncle Sam Don't Want Me, 1970

Chapter 26: Uncle Sam Don’t Want Me, 1970

In late February 1970, I had finally received the order to report for my pre-induction physical. I mentioned this fact to Howie and he furnished me the telephone number of a doctor who was the mother of one of the other former High School Student Union activists. After I telephoned the anti-war doctor, she referred me to another anti-war doctor, who arranged an appointment with me in her office.

I asked a few Newsreel people whether they thought it made political sense for me to enter the U.S. Army and try to do anti-war organizing from within. The consensus was that little could still be accomplished by Movement activists going into the U.S. Army and that Newsreel people, themselves, would not be able to provide me with much outside support if I was so foolhardy as to go into the U.S. Army.

So on the day of my pre-induction physical, I took an early morning BMT subway train down to Fort Hamilton in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn; and in my pocket was a letter. The letter stated that I was psychologically unfit for military service and that I would likely endanger the lives of my fellow combatants in a combat situation, because of my psychotic fear of authority.

At the military base, I noticed that among the predominantly African-American and Puerto Rican group of 200 young men, about 5 or 6 white young men had large manila envelopes with X-rays in them. I waited in line as the 200 of us got processed and examined; and I held my anger in at this first personal contact with the discipline of a U.S. military that was committing genocide in Viet Nam. I felt like shouting out to the other pre-inductees: “How can you let them take your life for use as cannon fodder? Why don’t we all start shouting `Hell, No! We won’t go!?” But I realized that if I made a political scene at the pre-induction physical my chances for a psychological deferment would vanish and it would mean jail, induction or exile for me.

I did get into an argument, however, with one of the African-American soldiers who controlled your position on line, after I complained aloud about the slow pace of the pre-induction physical examination process. In response, he ordered me to the end of the line.

After hours and hours of waiting, most of the other potential conscripts were certified as fit to be drafted and told that their pre-induction physical was over. About 10 of us, however, were ordered to wait outside the Army shrink’s office. Five of us had letters in our pockets from doctors and five of us had no letters. After about another hour of waiting, it was my turn to be interviewed by the Army shrink. I walked into his office with a downcast expression.

He asked for my letter, opened the envelope and read it, as I sat on the other side of his desk. He then looked at me with some disdain, as I maintained my downcast expression, and asked me a few questions related to my use of alcohol and my “sketchy” job history since getting a college diploma 7 months before. Then he stamped some papers and sent me to another office in the pre-induction physical center. At the next office, a young soldier looked at me with some pity, stamped my papers again and informed me that I was “4F.”

I continued to maintain my downcast expression, as I walked out of the pre-induction physical center at a slow pace. When I got closer to the gate of the base, I started to walk a little faster. Once I was off the base, I began to smile and laugh and broke into a run to the subway. I felt happier than I had ever been since the bombing of North Viet Nam had begun on a daily basis in early 1965.

Uncle Sam would never want me again. I had successfully resisted being drafted for military service in an immoral war. I could continue to devote my life to serving the cause of human liberation, not the needs of the U.S. military machine.

Once the draft threat was no longer over my head, I personally felt less desperate than I had been since high school. I still intended to do some kind of Movement-oriented work, but now I was doing it by choice and not also because I felt imprisoned by the draft threat. After I left Newsreel, however, I did not know where I would now fit into the Movement, exactly.