Dear Proffessor Searle-

I just watched a documentary-" Berkeley in the 60s"- in which you were interviewed. If you would be so kind, I have been thinking intently on this period of history for a long while now. As there things I want accomplished in the present, I am trying to learn from the past, rather thanh imitate it, but this present is a bleak one, and I am looking for a little hope. I hope you will not fidn this too forward. . .

I was born and raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and have moved in adulthood to Cambridge, Massachusetts. These places, from what I understand, were also hotbeds of activity in the late sixties and early seventies. But I am 29- so I was not there for that time period. I help run a small, struggling "art space" in cambridge, which housing activists also sometimes use, and play avant improvisation on the violin(I am as facinated with fin de siecle caberet culture in europe as I am with the sixties). At the Gallery I hear the same thing over and over from people who aspire to DO things- "oh, we can't, its not the sixties anymore". I mean, I've heard that very PHRASE from more than seven people on separate occasions in the last year! In fact, I have heard this my whole life, and found it to be a self-fulfiling prophecy! We can't change anything, create non-cynical art, try to stop not the war but the WARS our country is engaging in, believe in anything, As I grew up, I met many folks who were involved in the activism, art, thought, and culture which sprung out of the enourmous forces at play during that time. I noticed comanalities between them.

One commonality I see amongst those invovled in the variated activities associated with the counter culture and the anti-war movement is that when they speak, they very often refer to themselves, and their personal experience, as "WE". Why? There certainly does not seem to be a feeling of "WE" at present. Not even marchign through boston with 50,000 anti-war demonstrators two months ago was there any sense of "WE". There is something very powerful about that- I and many other people I know who were not even there ache for this sense of "WE". Do you have any idea as to why it might have dissappeared? Or is just a myth?

The most distubing commonality I see between people who were involved in the anti-war, civil rights, womens lib, counter-culture is APOLOGY. As if some great, traumatic failure had happened, something perhaps even beyond the arrival of too many police and national guards. . . I know parents, even in liberal, free thinking ann arbor and cambridge, are quick to discredit their "hippie years" to their children. I can't put my finger on what it is exactly. . .though I have tried to make a more articulate description of the thing in my mind many times, mostly its something I see or hear intuitively. A subtle shrug, a cast down look, a chiding description of people who founded the civil rights movement, the womens movement, and did everything they could to stop the vietnam war, as "yes, we were young then". While the people invovled in those movements did not accomplish everything they dreamed of, why is it that so many people just, I dont' know, GAVE UP after around 1972? There were a great number of inovative, amazing, community building organizations started in the early seventies, even AFTER the war came to a close- womens shelters, food co-ops, alternative educational facilities(I went to one of these as a kid and it quite literally saved my life), radio stations, newspapers, artists and activists collectives, free health clinics, but they are mostly GONE now! Or worse, altered and sold out- called what they used to be and run in a mainstream, cynical, corporate fashion. Why did so many people give up?

I feel as if the world were asleep- it seems as though if masses of people are not driven by the most intense surges of passion, they are not driven at all. Isn't there some balance between passion and reason which can bring action? I know the leaders of these movements were insanely well-educated, and that this is not an option for most of us anymore because of what it costs to go to college. I know rents in centralised areas were much, much cheaper(and not just due to inflation), so you didnt' have to work 40, 50, 60 hours a week just to have a roof over your head. I know there was actualy government money out there for social change projects, and that criminal law was not nearly as stiff as it is now. I know there was the real and actual risk of being drafted which is no longer the case. . . but as I was not there, I have no final or difinitive way to tell if things were "worse" then. I know that a hundred national guardsmen swooping down with tear gas looks every bit as bad to me as getting evicted, but I've only lived through the later so I can't say. I do know that everything seems ineffectual, that those organizations started in the early seventies have no continuation and no heirs, that people are tiended for life to the bank for a simple educaton, that every counter-cultural twon and city center I've been to or heard about, the rents are skyrocketting so that you must give up, get in line, put on your uniform, and get a job- not nessasarily one your concience would want you to be doing either. I know that we are at war almost constantly, and only a few died-hard people here, twenty, thirty, seem to know or care, and they are madly disorganised. That the co-op here is on its way under, while simlutaneously tryign tto imitate the Whole Foods market which kills co-ops by imitating *them*, and the womens center is usualy empty, and the only free health center is the one provided by medicaid which is gettign cut.

I ache for something to HAPPEN, to see and help create change. I work part time as a secratary, and I am constantly invovled in activity in my own world, "out" music, at the Gallery, and have gotten invovled in some street theater of late- I go to demostrations, write letters, do all these things, but this overwhelming sense of ominous defeat seems to remain heavy in the air. As if it didnt' work the first time and it won't now. But I've read at least SOME history and know that is NOT TRUE. A great DEAL was accomplished by those activists, all of them in their different spheres. . . why is it so many of them are so defeated? I've had this idea for a Free University, but the only ones I've ever read about were inside of regular universities. I've thought and thought about the decimation of gathering points, lines of communication- sometimes I think its intentional and think i'm getting paranoid- through street permits, redesign, and high rents. Through teh packagign and sellign back to you of anythign you come up with that goes anyplace at all. But there do not seem to be any answers. I've wondered how on earth one goes about reaching the public and letting them know, at least, whats REALLY going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, what happened in Panama, when the newspapers are controled by five companies(or are we parign down more now?). I'm still trying to find the cure for television poisoning. . . I would greatly appreciate knowing your thoughts on all of this, how it pertains to the present. What did you learn about how- and how NOT - to organize? And what did you learn Later?

I hope I have not come off spluteering and incoherant. . . I feel deeply for these issues. Thank you for reading and considering. . .

Katt Hernandez