Steal This Book
STEAL THIS BOOK by Abbie Hoffman is something of a handbook for survival in America, well, non-corperate survival. I think it is an absolute crying shame that this book has not been kept current. I actually did steal that book, but you don’t have to. It has been graciously provided online by the good people at Black Market Press
From an Amazon book review:
The first chapter on how to get free stuff is brilliant. Some ideas in order to gain free service or items area so ironic, you’d probably not think of it yourself. In section two, Hoffman describes how to take action against oppression and what to prepare for. Bomb making, first aid, and the introduction to new common sense is delivered straight from the mind of Hoffman. The third section is the shortest, but if you happen to live in the big urban and metropolitan areas, it locates address and phone numbers on where to get free stuff in a more specific sense overall toward the book.
First, the question that seems to plague so many of the people in my generation: “what the hell happened to our parents’ generation!” I was about to express a similar concern, with the lament that no one ever took up the work begun by someone like Abbie Hoffman and ran with it. What happened? Well, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, as was Kennedy, I’m sure these two events represent a conscious effort on the part of SOMEONE out there to enforce a counter-action to the revolutionary events of the time. I will not however allow that generation, or ours, to get off that easily.
Maybe they took too many drugs, maybe they capitulated to the middle class standards that they had railed so hard against, maybe they fell in love with money. Maybe they got scared. Maybe they got tired. Maybe they hope their kids will fix it. Maybe they were wrong. Who knows. It is sad that the largest and best-educated generation our country has ever seen was so close to making a complete change in the way of theings, and then they copped out. But that is all it is, a cop out, and it continues to be.
Ghandi said “be the change you wish to see in the world.”
The second notion that caught my eye is a rahter rediculous one, that we are evolving. Bullshit we’re evolving! Evolution requires two things in order to operate, the first thing is the passage of huge amounts of time, so that the notion that the human race has been capable of any significant evolution since the 1960’s is a difficult notion to swallow.
Secondly, evolution requires natural selection, survival of the fittest, and this is a very rude thing to say, but even the least fit survive: its an unfortuante side effect of the wonderful human capacity to love everyone. From a human point of view, all people have a right to life. From nature’s point of view, only the fit have a right to survive. Evolution no longer applies to human beings.