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  • I went through a personal burnout period in 1970 71.

  • Uh, I left, uh, the movement to its own devices.

  • I became very self consciously.

  • Ah, non leader.

  • I left the big city.

  • It was San Francisco.

  • It might have been New York, Chicago, Boston.

  • It happened to be San Francisco and went to, ah to live in a in the countryside.

  • It could have been northern California.

  • It was, in fact, a farmhouse outside a Putney Vermont.

  • There were maybe 1/2 dozen, sometimes a dozen other people living at this very spacious place.

  • Uh, all of whom were more or less in this in the situation of burn out that I was in wondering what to do, wondering if there was anything to do more politically scared of the weatherman scared of the of the FBI, even Maur, uh, beginning to be quite desperate, I suppose, in a political sense.

  • And many of us wondering whatever was gonna happen to this country but no longer feeling that anything that we did made much difference.

  • I started writing songs, uh, working on some literary projects in this period.

  • I still was a political person.

  • I gave what we called a Wednesday night class at the farmhouse.

  • A few 100 people would come.

  • We would talk about politics and then turn on the music and dance for a while.

  • We didn't have the feeling that what we did was important in the stream of riel politics.

  • As before, a group like that might have felt.

  • I think all of us felt isolated, partly self isolated.

  • We felt that events we're absolutely out of control.

  • It was still important to go on the big monster marches which were characteristic of that period just to keep the numbers growing and to keep the keep the faith.

  • But at the same time in your heart, you didn't know what was gonna happen.

  • It looked like Nixon was, uh, tall in the saddle and would do whatever he wanted to do.

  • In 1970 71 72.

  • Nobody saw Watergate coming.

  • And if Watergate hadn't come and stop Nixon in his tracks, who knows what would have been the result in Vietnam?

  • We cannot say with any certainty that Nixon would stop short of a bombing the dikes in North Vietnam.

  • We know that he was intimidating those people as much as he could.

  • And we know that the government was trying to crack down as hard as it could on the leadership of the antiwar movement, as though to say, the Hanoi don't trust in the anti war movement.

  • Don't think that the anymore movement is gonna talk the American government out of this war.

  • We're gonna hurt you until you say, uncle.

I went through a personal burnout period in 1970 71.

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