Flying Close to the Sun by Cathy Wilkerson

Author:Cathy Wilkerson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2010-05-18T00:00:00+00:00

By the time we headed back to Washington, the main event on the horizon was the Democratic convention scheduled for Chicago in late August. While national SDS refused to endorse the demonstrations, many older SDS members and veterans were recruited for different roles by the demonstration’s leadership, which included both Tom Hayden and Rennie Davis. Many current SDS activists in the leadership of different regions and in the national office were also drawn to the event because they knew that tens of thousands of young people would be coming to Chicago. Many of these young supporters of Gene McCarthy would presumably be open to hearing a more radical analysis of the world.

A lot had happened in the national office in the past month. Bernardine Dohrn and Mike Klonsky had collected a new team and were trying to shape SDS into the revolutionary leadership of the movement. Bernardine wrote about SDS’s relationship with the Panthers, in an article entitled “White Mother Country Radicals.”34 “Mother Country” referred to the United States as the hub of a global economic system. The Black Panther Party had decided to use the electoral forum as a way to bring its message to thousands of new people. It had invited Carl Oglesby to run as second to Eldridge Cleaver on the Peace and Freedom Party in the upcoming elections. Carl had brought the decision to SDS’s leadership, who decided to reject the offer because of its emphasis on electoral politics. “The main point,” Bernardine wrote, “is: The best thing that we can be doing for ourselves, as well as for the Panthers and the revolutionary black liberation struggle, is to build a fucking white revolutionary mass movement, not a national paper alliance.”

It was becoming clear that a substantial number of SDS members were abandoning any hope of reforming representative democracy.The system was too compromised by the massive wealth and corruption of the small elite of the military-industrial complex that now seemed to be running the show. Quietly, in the midst of the change, many of us were giving up on the idea of democracy altogether, although I, like many others, was still trying to hold onto what I saw as the best of both ideas: the participatory nature of democracy along with the strong leadership and coherence promised by revolution.

I had long since abandoned any hope that Congress could initiate change or even support it, until a majority of people actively sought change. During this period, however, I began to consider the possibility that Congress couldn’t even follow the majority because too many of its members had been bought off by major corporate interests. What other access to changing policy did we have then, other than revolution? I still believed in participatory democracy, but I continued to worry about the problem of why the majority seemed so content to ignore the costs of racism and to accept the distortion of truth about the war. I thought we needed a new model. My attention was drawn to the

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