66
DOTSON
RADER
"How do you mean? People always make love."
"When I was your age we used to tear around in cars and screw
in the back seat. Sex was the most important thing. How important is
sex here?"
''Oh,'' she said, and thought a moment. "The hippies play a lot,
even in the park. But the hippies, the hippies aren't really part of our
scene. Sex
is
there all right. Look at me," she laughed, "but I don't
think it's taken too seriously. Like we don't make the revolution in bed."
I changed the subject. "Where do you think America is going?"
"To hell."
"What can you do about it?"
"Outside of praying?" she asked, facetiously. "We can bring the
rev.>lution. I can't do much right today, but when I am through with
school I'm going somewhere, to some big city, and work as an or–
ganizer for SDS or someone. I mean, we are going to have a revolution
so we have to organize for it, get guns, things like that."
"You believe in violence?" I asked the obvious, but I wanted
to
make sure again. Nearly every high school student I talked with men–
tioned revolution as the only alternative, completely disregarding a re–
formist approach. And that was new, the acceptance of the necessity
and morality of revolution. Less than a year ago most radicals still
spoke of reformist structural change. Now, at least among the youngest
elements of the Movement, revolution was the goal.
"No," Anne said, hedging, "but I believe in self-defense. Amer–
ica'll be an armed camp in five years. The army has those concentra–
tion camps for dissenters. Nixon is already sending leaders to jail on
drug charges and thing like that. The kids will have to get arms and
probably will have to make our own communities, like hippie com–
munes, in the country, armed communities. It will be guerrilla war in a
few years."
"Where will you be then?"
"On the side of the guerrillas."
''There's a journalistic cliche," I said, "that the high school kids
don't trust anyone over thirty. Is that true?" I was three years away from
banishment.
"I suppose. The old people have sold out. Nothing but wars with
them. And racism. What have they done for you to trust them?"
"You wouldn't want to kill them, would you?"
"Some of them. There should be war trials, like in Germany after
the war, for the President and Johnson and the others. The generals
and the businessmen. They should be shot."
