The aspects of patriotism that hush dissent, encourage going along, and sanction comfortable distancing and compliance with what is indecent and unacceptable… those aspects are too fundamental to ignore or gloss over.
You can’t win for losing. Either you fulfill their stereotype of being a radical 60’s person or you’ve sold out. In fact, of course, millions of people who were active in the 60’s are doing work on issues that try to reflect their values.
I don’t feel that it was violent and terrible. I feel like it was primarily–obviously not completely–moral, based on a vision that the government should be better, and that people could be better, and that democracy should be real.
Killing a cop just because he’s a cop, that’ll happen. And that should happen. And there’s nothing inhuman about it at all. It’s survival. It’s the most human thing in the world.
