September 5, 2013

I've been traveling a lot lately (which is the reason for the absence of posts on here). On one of my plane rides, I got a chance to watch Robert Redford's The Company You Keep, starring Shia LaBeouf, Susan Sarandon, and Red himself. Let's just say the historical footage in the movie was maybe the best part of the entire thing, and Robert Redford's looking a little too old to play dad to an 11 year old girl. 

The Company You Keep


That said, watching the movie inspired my curiosity in the Weather Underground, the radical activist group from the '60s that the movie is based on.

Most of my knowledge on the Weather Underground comes from the book Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in reading about the Sixties counterculture movement. The Weather Underground was formed on the Ann Arbor campus of The University of Michigan sometime in 1969, mainly as a reaction to the failed peaceful protects to the Vietnam War and the Democratic National Convention of 1968 in Chicago, when thousands of innocent protestors shouting "THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING" were beaten by the Chicago police in plain view of television reporters. The whole world indeed was watching, but did they do anything about it? Not really. The Weather Underground wanted to fix that, bring the war home, and stop Vietnam. Their approach was in extreme opposition to the peaceful movement indoctrinated by Martin Luther King Jr. They would not protest peacefully, but with force, and cause havoc and chaos as deemed fit.

When I have more time on my hands, I'll get down to elaborating on the Weather Underground, maybe the most fascinating activist group of the '60s. 

The end. 

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