Most people who claim to be radicals, both now and in 1969, were and are nothing of the sort. Most have now settled into quiet white-collar lives not too different from their parents . Few protestors for class warfare actually know anything about the lives of blue-collar workers. The workers, prototypes of the men who actually served in Vietnam in Harvard students steads, guffawed at the students presumption. And the blue-collar policemen were only too pleased to get their licks in against the kids who took over University Hall.
Radicalism is no joke or romantic fling.
It is damaging in theory and, if applied, murderous. Many radicals in the United States supported the Khmer Rouge in their rebellion against the Lon Nol government in Phnom Penh during the Cambodian civil war. As fashionable as Che Guevara or the Viet Cong, the Khmer Rouge were exotic and certainly anti-establishment. Yet when the guerrillas did finally conquer Phnom Penh in April of 1975, the logical conclusion of radicalism became jarringly apparent. Declaring the Year Zero, the Communists evacuated Phnom Penh and dispatched over a million people to re-education camps more appropriately termed The Killing Fields.