[This diary may have special significance since Occupy Wall Street broke on the scene last fall. It deals with a similar explosion of struggle, now nearly forgotten, that found hundreds of American campuses occupied, in part or entirely, by rebelling students who were not only protesting but experimenting with new ways of structuring society.
I originally posted it at Fire on the Mountain in 2010 in an attempt to reclaim the history of the great campus eruption of May, 1970, forty years earlier--the most massive wave of student protest this country has ever seen. It turned out to be the first of 19 (!) diaries following events as they unfolded then.]
Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,
We’re finally on our own...
Forty-two years ago today, on Thursday, April 30, 1970, Richard Milhouse Nixon, the president of the United States, appeared on television for a special announcement about the Vietnam War. He told us that US troops, tens of thousands of them, had moved into Cambodia, expanding an already prolonged and costly war into another country. He claimed it was a necessary step toward ending the war, and toward insuring that the US would not be perceived in the world as "a pitiful helpless giant."