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Recreate ’68: This is Your Mother’s Protest Organization
As I arrived yesterday morning at Recreate ‘68’s main event, I wondered if I had bad information about the start time. The umbrella organization seeking to unite various left-wing protest organizations that are just as upset with Senator Obama and the “Demopulicans” as they are with “Republocrats” was expecting as many as 50,000 people for a 9:00 AM “End the Occupation” rally followed by a three mile march. But only a couple hundred people were present, and of those, a slim majority appeared to be members of the media. Any doubts that I had arrived too early were erased a few minutes later when the first speaker took the stage right on time.
The Recreate ‘68 (aka R68) event was brimming with nostalgia for the good fights of decades past, and particularly those associated with the notorious 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago where protesters and Mayor Daley’s police force were involved in violent clashes. Such backward looking sentiment, of course, was not present forty years ago in Chicago. In many respects, the progressive protesters of the Sixties had the opposite goal. They sought to dispense with traditional norms which were seen as corrupt and degrading. Like the original progressives of early 1900s, the Sixties protesters saw history moving in an inevitable and just direction. Looking to the past and resting on tradition had to be rejected because it threatened to slow this natural flow of progress and leave humanity mired in conflict. Not so with R68. R68 seeks to revive something rooted in the past—a return to a golden era of protest.
And that goal was reflected in yesterday’s speakers and crowd. Nearly all of the headliners were aging Baby Boomers and many were veterans of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s anti-war protests. Among others, the speaker list included Ward Churchill (the fired University of Colorado professor), Black Panther Kathleen Cleaver, Ron Kovic (author of Born on the Fourth of July), and Green Party Presidential Candidate Cynthia McKinney. Only one speaker appeared to be under the age of 40. The same generational dynamic was evident in the assembled crowd. Students—the backbone of the Sixties protests—were in short supply. The 9:00 AM start time probably had something to do with it. While early mornings may be a way of life for the AARP members who planned and led today’s event, no college student would have selected such a start time. My guess is that early AM events weren’t the norm in ‘68.
The rally’s most spectacular event occurred when a Fox News team led by Griff Jenkins arrived midway through the rally. As Jenkins approached and tried to interview R68 organizers and speakers, he was besieged by protesters who had caught sight of the Fox logo on his microphone.
Hip-hop duo “dead prez” provided another memorable moment. Unfortunately, their act was plagued by Milli Vanilli issues. Music played and two voices were singing, but only one member of dead prez was holding a microphone in the vicinity of his mouth. The other dead prez ran to the side of the stage to examine a sound control panel midway through the first song and shouted to his partner, “We need to make sure this mic is on.” It wasn’t. But his recorded voice continued to emanate out of the speakers. By the third song, though, it was all systems go and the last ten minutes of the performance went off without a hitch. There was no encore.
The rally ended on that note and the march began several minutes later at noon. But for some protesters, marching three miles in 2008 isn’t as easy as it was forty years ago. Ward Churchill told me, “I cannot physically make the march because I had surgery … so I’m kinda hobbled. Three miles is more than I’m going to be able to do.” Fortunately, a smattering of teens and twenty-somethings had managed to roll out of bed and arrive in time for the post-rally march and reinforce sidelined protesting veterans like Churchill.