Certainly it was personal for me.

These ideas.

We're not just speeches in the forum.

The pain of it all became most acute in terms of my relationship with my dad.

He couldn't understand why I was so upset that with a wife and three kids and a pretty little house on Sunnyside Street, I would throw that all over quick.

My good job, which to him was a great job.

That was a step up.

He had worked in a factory all his life and hear his son was white collar with a college education that, to him, was terrific.

Why complain about that?

Why throw that over to run off with these strange political gypsies who are into something they call the movement?

It led to an enormous rupture in our relationship, only the promise of a material half Lawrence on Lee.

The promise of two cars, only the promise of a split level divided again and again and again in suburbia after suburbia after suburbia.

That's the only thing that this that this culture can offer people now Brad alone.

No, The question is whether or not you're going to accept that I shared a blazing contempt for everything that America seemed to pride itself in that is to say, straight middle America.

All right, since then, I think I've learned to appreciate better they the terrific labor, they industry and good luck that are required for the the purge er of that dream.

It looks shakier these days, and the culture that could achieve some confidence in its ability to provide the nice house on the Nice Street, the nice school, the nice college education, the nice job.

The confidence of such a culture seems more of, ah, more of an achievement than it did.

It seemed to come without effort, but now I understand there was a lot of effort, and a lot of chancing is to it.

For a tiny fringe of the millions of young people who are radicalized in the 19 sixties, 19 seventies became a time to declare war on America.

Frustrated by Vietnam and enraged by police repression, these self professed revolutionaries vowed to fight back against those they called the fascist establishment.

There was an explosion, probably in the cellar, and it flew out the cellar walls.

The basement walls of front wall collapsed on the floor Lord and started a fire that consumed almost the entire building.

In 1973 members of the Weathermen blew themselves up when a Greenwich Village town house they had converted to a bomb factory accidentally exploded.

One of the weatherman kids who was killed in the townhouse explosion in 1970 tearing Robbins was a great fan of the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

You remember a movie about a couple of outlaws who for a long time can get away with anything.

They have so many cute tricks.

Suddenly there's a guy chasing them who they can't outfox.

And the one Butch keeps saying to the other Sundance, looking back, Who are those guys mingling of fear and admiration?

The weatherman felt the same thing.

Who are those guys?

They knew they had attracted the big shots.

The big boys were coming after them.

The ones that the weatherman would never be able to outfox or outwit or outlast or out organized.

They knew they were done for.

They had a really quality of fatalism and death about them, but they thought they had to.

Nevertheless, they had to go ahead and do what they were doing, which came to building bombs.

Because legitimate politics had been destroyed by Amerika, spelled with a K For many political activists who were frustrated, exhausted and broke, the blossoming counterculture seemed to signal that they're causes head hit, a dead end.

Attracted by this appealing alternative, some activists left the city behind to explore a quieter non political life in the country.

I went through a personal burnout period in 1970 71.

Uh, I left, uh, the movement towards own devices.

I became very self consciously.

Ah, non leader.

I left the big city and went to look in the countryside.

There were maybe 1/2 dozen, sometimes a dozen other people living at this very spacious place.

Uh, all of whom were more or less in this in the situation of burnout that I was in wondering what to do, wondering if there was anything to do more politically scared of the weatherman scared of the of the FBI, even Maur, uh, beginning to be quite desperate, I suppose, in a political sense and many of us wondering whatever was gonna happen to this country, but no longer feeling that anything that we did made much difference.

When will those questions be answered?

With the memories and passions from the sixties still stirring in so many, perhaps history won't be able to decide on the full impact of the sixties until the last member of the sixties generation has passed on.

That's the sentiment of the second answer to the question about the real meaning of the sixties experience.

An appreciation that on a personal level, at least, final assessments don't come easy.

Car locals be.

And meantime, we had an experience which I suppose is unique in American history and which nobody who went through it will ever forget.

It's an experience filled with treasured moments and nightmares alike.

To this day, all inter interwoven, and I think that it will always be this way.

The sixties will never level out.

It's a corkscrew.

It's a tail spin.

It's joy right on a roller coaster.

It's a never ending mystery.

Who won, who lost?

What were the terms of victory and defeat?

We'll always be discussing that.

I think it was American.

It was another civil War in a sense.

And it has all the the drama, the melodrama, the comedy, the pathos, above all the confusion, the uncertainty as to outcome and meaning and significance that the Civil war of the 18 sixties had.

Maybe it's just that in every sixties decade, 18th century, 19th century, 20th century.

We have to go through some crisis like this.

But there was certainly certainly that we had us a time, and we're still trying to figure out what it was all about.