By Bruce Anderson – Anderson Valley Advertiser, September 12, 1990
Hippie! The beast that won’t die! Several callers, including Jim Squatter, David Kemnitzer, and Sequoia, complained about the AVA’s assessment of Redwoodstock, the idiotic summer-ending demonstration in Northern Humboldt County. Squatter, of Seeds of Peace, and Sequoia of Greenfield, said the three-day event was a great success. Bullshit. For a bunch of hippies without roots in the community to go into a place like Fortuna with a counterculture road show isn’t politics, it’s sabotage. I thought we’d gotten past the “let’s outrage the squares” childishness of the sixties, the kind of exhibitionism that repulses ordinary people.
Sequoia said people stayed away from Redwoodstock because “they’re chickenshit.” People stayed away because:
- They knew a three-day hippie fair was politically stupid and
- The events were not advertised in a way that made clear what people could expect which is what happens when a purportedly serious political run at the corporations lacks intelligent planning and leadership.
It is grossly insensitive and arrogant for unconventional persons, freed from the obligations that burden most people, to show up in a strange place for fun and games. There are literally hundreds of committed Humboldt County enviros who stayed away, not because they feared the bellowing bullies and assholes who always show up to hippie hassle, but because they were discouraged in many ways from participating. The Fort Bragg demonstration, by way of contrast, was planned by women who live and work in Fort Bragg which translated as a large turnout of people from Fort Bragg and the surrounding communities. Dave Foreman’s analysis of the exhibitionist influence in Earth First! is not all the way wrong. We beat the corporations at Samoa and we beat them at Fort Bragg. They won easily at Fortuna.