Remember the '70's? That was the decade that took us from hippies to yuppies, from Americans at war to Americans held hostage, from roughing it to high-tech. During the '70s, more than any city in America, San Francisco showed the signs, the symbols and the scars of the times. Today is the first day of the rest of your life. That was the theme of an entire generation trying to change the world, or at least change themselves.
The world changed and we changed with it. Of course, much of what we think of as the '60s was still waiting to happen. You had only to look around in the Spring of 1970 to see. The year before, our presence in Vietnam hit its highest mark. Over a half million American soldiers.
By 1970, some troops had begun coming home. But that didn't mean the war was ended. After a year of secret bombing raids, ground troops raided Cambodia, an ostensibly neutral neighbor of Vietnam, triggering the violent protest of the war.
At Kent State in Ohio, National Guardsmen fired on student demonstrators, killing four. Immediately student strikes hit campuses all over the country. At Stanford, at Berkeley and in downtown San Francisco, thousands marched to end the war. By 1970, it had become a familiar site but the crowd was bigger than any we'd seen yet.
The protesters now were from every neighborhood and every profession. But it would be five years before the war in Vietnam was finally over. And in the meantime, the movement had discovered lots of other causes.
(Copyright 2002 KRON 4. All Rights Reserved.)
California's congressional Democrats endorsed Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante's motto of "No on recall, yes on Bustamante," effectively rejecting the anti-recall strategy of Gov. Davis.
