What Were Those 1960s Terrorists Thinking, Anyway?

Looking Back at CAPBOMB

By JUDY GUMBO ALBERT

We are forces of chaos and anarchy
Everything they say we are, we are
And we are very
Proud of ourselves.

--Jefferson Airplane, We Can Be Together

This is the inside story of how my late husband Stew Albert and I became prime suspects in CAPBOM, which is the FBI codename for the 1971 Weather Underground bombing of the United States Capitol Building in Washington D.C. Sarah Palin and her cohort of extreme right-wing really, really scary people used the Capitol bombing to link President-elect Obama with the not nearly as scary 1960s Weatherman and 1997 Chicago Citizen of the Year Bill Ayres.   At the time, my widely quoted take on the Capitol bombing was: "We didn't do it, but we dug it."

As a former 60's protestor, celebrating with everyone else the results of this historic election, I'd like to give my personal point of view about the attacks on the 1960s that were made during the campaign – specifically "guilt by association" and "domestic terrorism." And also to reflect a bit on how I feel about those issues today.

Wrong Place, Right Time

In the spring of 1971, on the day the Capitol bombing takes place, I'm living in our nation's capital organizing an anti-war demonstration. Along with Stew, Abbie and Anita Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, his girlfriend Nancy Kurshan and satiric journalist Paul Krassner, I'm an original Yippie. Yippies believe in the politics of theatre. We call ourselves Groucho Marxists and use comedy to turn serious issues on their head.  We're cultural revolutionaries who raise political awareness by having as much fun and getting as much media attention as we can. We're a youth movement who doesn't believe in hierarchy: every Yippie is her or his own leader. Our favorite Bob Dylan mantra is: Don't follow leaders, watch the parking meters.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and FederalReserve Chairman Ben Bernanke are not the first to throw money at Wall Street.  In the spring of 1968, Abbie, Jerry and the rest of us stopped trading on the New York Stock exchange when we threw $1 and $5 bills at greedy stockbrokers who grabbed at the money floating down from a balcony.  Yippies brought the New York Stock Exchange to a halt for a mere $250.

By the summer of 1968, at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, we're running a pig named Pigasus for president as a send-up to protest the election and an unjust and illegal Vietnam War. In what is to become an iconic American moment, 15,000 of us -- Yippies, mainstream anti-war demonstrators, the media and even a member of the British Parliament -- are severely gassed and beaten by the Chicago police.

But three years later, by the time of the Capitol bombing, it's becoming more and more difficult to find the fun in protest.  All of us in the anti-war movement are frustrated by the seemingly endless parade of atrocities being committed in Vietnam, which we see in living color at home on TV every night, and a recent campaign of deadly, intense carpet-bombing in Laos.

http://www.counterpunch.org/albert12252008.html