In Terms Of My Own Behavior And

Whether Or Not The Working Class Came To Chicago In 1969 In The Days Of Rage Is Not A Measure Of Their Commitment To Stopping The War Or To Seeing Life In Certain Way. There Were Very Few Of Us Who Were There, And Those Of Us That Were Had An Illusion About Ourselves.

The [vietnam] War's Gone On For Three Years. And We'd Thought We'd Ended It Because We'd Done Exactly What We Were Told And What We Told Ourselves We'd Had To Do. We Had A Majority. We Were Against The War And This Created A Crisis For Democracy And A Crisis For The Antiwar Movement.

Let's Look At Two Things Real Quickly: The Civil Rights Movement In Mississippi In The Sixties And The Arab Spring Starting In Tunisia And Cairo. What They Had In Common Was People Who Were Told, And Who Believed Inside Themselves, That They Were A Certain Way, And The Society At Large Believed It.

I Don't Know Why There's Not More Activism Today. I Do Think That Your Generation Is Twenty Times Smarter Than Our Generation Ever Was, But The Problem With Being Smart Like You Guys Is That It Can Lead You Really Easily To Being Cynical, And Cynicism Is Actually A Pacifying Attitude.

I Think That You're Smarter Than We Were, But We Had Two Things: One Is, In Our Naïveté We Believed We Could Change The World. And Number Two, We Believed That Another World Was Possible. And Once That Belief Took Hold Of Some Critical Mass, A Tiny Minority Nonetheless, But A Critical Mass Of People, Then The World Did Change.