In my hometown, radicalism did not seem likely to catch on.
The first stirrings of the 60s Movement in my high school were not terribly auspicious. The era was ushered in for us when Scott Weinstein and some of his brainy friends began showing up at school in odd-looking clothing, and refusing to say the pledge of allegiance. The clothes actually had the most immediate effect on everybody—even those of us who had never heard what they had to say on political issues. In an era when cool guys were recognizable by their pointy-toed black shoes and tapered Continental pants, Scott Weinstein took to wearing outsized woolen lumberjack shirts and yellow hiking boots. Maybe the boots were meant to look rugged, but they actually bore a closer resemblance to something Elmer Fudd might wear. Scott’s way of walking also didn’t help: bouncing along on his tippy-toes, with his body leaning stiffly forward and his arms dangling uselessly by his sides, no amount of checked wool could ever have made him look like an outdoorsman. As for the pledge of allegiance business, Scott’s group said it had something to do with Vietnam. The rest of us really didn’t want to hear about it. We were just outraged that these nerds would stop supporting their own country, in favor of a communist regime that we were at war with. If anybody had suggested then that Scott and his crowd were leaders, and in the vanguard of something that would eventually carry away all but the dullest and most unimaginative of us with its sheer momentum and energy, our reaction would have gone beyond shocked disbelief, to outright guffaws. These guys weren’t leaders. Nobody would ever want to emulate or follow them.
(c) COPYRIGHT 2000 ROBERT WINTER. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
