The hippie spirit of Haight-Ashbury is alive and well in this documentary, shot in the heart of San Francisco during the days when hair was long, love was free and acid abounded. Featuring concert footage of Country Joe and the Fish and other bands, director Jack O’Connell’s quirky film captures the counterculture’s scope, from impassioned leaders such as Rev. Cecil Williams down to ordinary freaks on the street.
The film was invited to the 1968 Cannes Film Festival, but because of student riots against capitalism in France, political leaders there feared civil war or revolution. The film was withdrawn from the Cannes Festival because it was too incendiary for that time.
At 14 years old, Christian Picciolini, a bright and well-loved child from a good family, had been targeted and trained to spread a violent racist agenda, quickly ascending to a highly visible leadership position in America’s first neo-Nazi skinhead gang. Just how did this young boy from the suburbs of Chicago, who had so much going for him, become so lost in extremist ideologies that would horrify any decent person? ‘Romantic Violence: Memoirs of an American Skinhead’ is a poignant and gripping cautionary tale that details Christian’s indoctrination when he was barely a teen, a lonely outsider who, more than anything, just wanted to belong. A fateful meeting with a charismatic man who recognized and took advantage of Christian’s deep need for connection sent the next decade of his life into a dangerous spiral. When his mentor went to prison for a vicious hate crime, Christian stepped forward, and at 18, he was overseeing the most brutal extremist skinhead cells across the country. From fierce street brawls to drunken white power rallies, recruitment by foreign terrorist dictators to riotous white power rock music, Picciolini immersed himself in racist skinhead culture, hateful propaganda, and violence. Ultimately Christian began to see that his hate-filled life was built on lies. After years of battling the monster he created, he was able to reinvent himself. Picciolini went on to become an advocate for peace, inclusion, and racial diversity, co-founding the nonprofit Life After Hate, which helps people disengage from hate groups and to love themselves and accept others, regardless of skin color, religious belief, or sexual preference.
George Washington, Robert E. Lee and Thomas Jefferson. Credit from left: Gilbert Charles Stuart; via Library of Congress; via Getty Images
August 15, 2017 (nytimes.com)
President Trump is not generally known as a student of history. But on Tuesday, during a combative exchange with reporters at Trump Tower in New York, he unwittingly waded into a complex debate about history and memory that has roiled college campuses and numerous cities over the past several years.
Asked about the white nationalist rally that ended in violence last weekend in Charlottesville, Va., Mr. Trump defended some who had gathered to protect a statue of Robert E. Lee, and criticized the “alt-left” counterprotesters who had confronted them.
“Many of those people were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee,” Mr. Trump said. “So this week, it is Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down.”
George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, the president noted, were also slave owners. “I wonder, is it George Washington next week?” Mr. Trump said. “And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after?”
“You know, you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?” he added, comparing the removal of statues to “changing history.”
Mr. Trump’s comments drew strongly negative reactions on Twitter from many historians, who condemned his “false equivalence” between the white nationalists and the counterprotesters.
But “where does it stop?” — and what counts as erasing history — is a question scholars and others have asked, in much more nuanced ways, as calls have come to remove monuments not just to the Confederacy, but to erstwhile liberal heroes and pillars of the Democratic Party like Andrew Jackson (a slave owner who, as president, carried out Native American removal) and Woodrow Wilson (who as president oversaw the segregation of the federal bureaucracy).
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A pedestal in Durham, N.C., that held a statue of a Confederate soldier before demonstrators pulled it down.CreditMadeline Gray for The New York Times
“The debates that started two or three years ago have saturated the culture so much that even the president is now talking about them,” said John Fabian Witt, a professor of history at Yale, which earlier this year announced that it would remove John C. Calhoun’s name from a residential college.
Mr. Witt called Mr. Trump’s warning of a slippery slope a “red herring.” There have been, after all, no calls to tear down the Washington Monument.
Annette Gordon-Reed, a professor of history and law at Harvard who is credited with breaking down the wall of resistance among historians to the idea that Jefferson had a sexual relationship with Sally Hemings, said that the answer to Mr. Trump’s hypothetical question about whether getting rid of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson also meant junking Washington and Jefferson was a simple “no.”
There is a crucial difference between leaders like Washington and Jefferson, imperfect men who helped create the United States, Ms. Gordon-Reed said, and Confederate generals like Jackson and Lee, whose main historical significance is that they took up arms against it. The comparison, she added, also “misapprehends the moral problem with the Confederacy.”
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A statue of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Va.CreditSteve Helber/Associated Press
“This is not about the personality of an individual and his or her flaws,” she said. “This is about men who organized a system of government to maintain a system of slavery and to destroy the American union.”
As for the idea of erasing history, it’s a possibility most scholars do not take lightly. But James Grossman, the executive director of the American Historical Association, said that Mr. Trump’s comments failed to recognize the difference between history and memory, which is always shifting.
When you alter monuments, “you’re not changing history,” he said. “You’re changing how we remember history.”
Some critics of Confederate monuments have called for them to be moved to museums, rather than destroyed, or even left in place and reinterpreted, to explain the context in which they were created. Mr. Grossman noted that most Confederate monuments were constructed in two periods: the 1890s, as Jim Crow was being established, and in the 1950s, during a period of mass Southern resistance to the civil rights movement.
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The statue of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee in Emancipation Park in Charlottesville, Va.CreditJulia Rendleman/Associated Press
“We would not want to whitewash our history by pretending that Jim Crow and disenfranchisement or massive resistance to the civil rights movement never happened,” he said. “That is the part of our history that these monuments testify to.”
How the events in Charlottesville, and Mr. Trump’s comments, will affect the continuing debate over Confederate monuments remains to be seen. Mr. Witt, for one, suggested that white nationalist support might backfire.
He noted that it was the 2015 murder of nine African-American churchgoers in Charleston, S.C., by a white supremacist that led to the removal of the Confederate flag from statehouse grounds.
“The amazing thing is that the president is doing more to endanger historical monuments than most of the protesters,” he said. “The alt-right is producing a world where there is more pressure to remove monuments, rather than less.”
A small revolution, a renaissance has been happing since humanity landed on the moon. For the first time we had a collective consciousness knowing we were not earth bound but truly of the stars. Thus began a wave of consciousness enlightenment where we are literally being able to restart our humanity with a new sense of identity. We are no longer earth bound or bound by a canon that says we must obey ancient rules and beliefs, which has caused wars, devastation of large sections of humanity, and cruelty at all levels. As much as we have come to see we have free will and no longer need to obey strict father rules in our spiritual and daily lives, we have also come to see that we are part of a great unbounded whole.
Some place in the far reaches of consciousness, at the moment of conception; our conscious mind is seeded with the connection to all life as well as the infinitude of existence. Our umbilical cord is attached to all life, plant, animal, and simple organism etc. We share common genetic codes in most cases at least 70-95%. This means to me, that we cannot undo our connection to life.
We are being reborn into our universe and in a renaissance time where we have the opportunity to understand being human in a whole new manner. We are now in a position to understand we are one with all life manifesting in infinite variety as individuals. For the first time we can begin to think in a deductive manner. We are aware of axioms and the importance of Truth and syllogistic reasoning based on axiomatic premises. In non-philosophical terms this means we have the ability to think in terms of facts that are so no matter where you are (such as 2 + 2=4 is always so). Our reasoning and thinking are no longer based on old prejudices, beliefs, and fears. Thinking abstractly and critically does not preclude using our intuition. We have the ability to go beyond our perceptions based on old beliefs, rules, and dogmas. This means we are free to create a renaissance of community, caring, and our identity
No longer bound by inductive reasoning where we assume things are a certain way because of our beliefs and prejudices; we are free of the shackles of the strict father rules. Inductive reasoning assumes we are different and separate from other beings. This false reasoning can cause us to lack empathy for all life. Good example of inductive reasoning is the proposed travel band. Assuming all people from the banned countries are terrorist. When we think inductively we make assumptions that are not based on facts.
A renaissance, a birth, is always bloody and filled with pain. This past year is a very good indication that as a community, a country, and hopefully a world, we cannot keep a watershed of the old as the new comes. The pain and fear we all feel from time-to-time is all apart of the new birth. Those not connected to our community as participants or allies will still be forced into a birth. Once the birth begins it cannot be put on hold.
There seems to be a cosmic intention that is pushing us forward through the pain and fear. We are being pushed toward a new concept of humanity. Awakened to, as the Chinese say, “human who walks among the stars.” This renaissance is bringing a new love to all that exist.
This was never more apparent than it was watching the faces of the families and children along the parade route of our Pride Parade. Children and family that know they are whole, complete, and love. The route was filled with individuals who were conceived in love, grew in love, and bring the message to all that would see and know in their hearts. In this we become inclusive in all that we experience and do.
It is time for us all to think with our hearts and feel with our minds.
Suzanne Deakins, HW, M. is a publisher (One Spirit Press and The Q Press) and author. Her books may be found on amazon.com. She teaches seminars on straight thinking and ontology, as well as Radical Forgiveness. She maybe reached at suzannedeakins@gmail.com. Watch for her new blog site www.asmallrevolution.com is available.
“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956
Total Solar Eclipse 2017: On Monday August 21, 2017, America will fall under the path of a total solar eclipse. The Great American Total Solar Eclipse will darken skies all the way from Oregon to South Carolina, along a stretch of land about 70 miles (113 kilometers) wide. People who descend upon this “path of totality” for the big event are in for an unforgettable experience.
REMEMBER: During totality, when the sun’s disk is completely covered by the moon, it is safe to view the eclipse with the naked eye. But skywatchers should NEVER look at a partial solar eclipse without proper eye protection. Looking directly at the sun, even when it is partially covered by the moon, can cause serious eye damage or blindness.
Tina Louise Spalding is hosting a FREE Channeling event on Monday August 21st where we meditate for a more peaceful and loving world. Please share this to as many people as possible so we can have a bigger impact. We are looking forward to seeing you in the chat room. See you soon! Join us on Monday August 21st at 9:00 AM PDT, 12:00 PM EDT.
