So, I’m a boomer, okay? I mean, a real Zelig of a boomer. I started Brandeis University just a few years after Abbie Hoffman and Angela Davis graduated. During my time there, two classmates, Kathryn Power and Susan Saxe, hooked up with a former convict studying at the campus on a government scholarship for parolees. Along with some of his ex-prison buddies, they robbed a National Guard Armory in Newburyport, Massachusetts and went on to kill a Boston police officer in a bank heist; Saxe and Power didn’t get their diplomas, but they did earn the distinction of being two of only ten women ever to make the FBI’s Most Wanted list. I saw the Who play at a dive club called the Boston Tea Party and an out-of-his-gourd Keith Moon—“Moon the Loon”—smash his drums into kindling. I was at the festival at Altamont outside of San Francisco, known for the moment when Mick Jagger’s Hell’s Angels “security guards,” hired in exchange for $500 worth of beer, stabbed and killed an 18-year-old African-American man.
I didn’t ask to be a boomer. To be honest, I wasn’t cut out for trippy, mud-sodden rock festivals or protests with doped-up yippies trying to levitate the Pentagon. (Like every other boomer—or so it seems—I was there, too.) I would have preferred growing up in a more peaceable, restrained era, like . . . well, let me get back to you on that.
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