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UNIVERSITY OF PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND

It’s ' against the law

to pee

in the street

by Jerry Rubin Liberation News Service

The revolution satisfies deep hum- an needs denied by Amerikan society. That’s why it’s so dangerous. The biggest social problem in the country today is loneliness.

“What are you doing tonight?”

“I don’t know, Marty, what are you doing tonight?”

Loneliness is not an individual pro- blem—it’s the collective problem of millions of Amerikans, growing out of the alienating environment we live in. We work in one part of town with people who are not our friend‘s, and we sleep in another part of town and don’t know our neighbors. We waste much of our life dying in mobile con- centration camps called freeways or commuter trains.

Where in the city can we go to make friends? Where can we leap out of our individual prisons and en- joy each other? The city is full of walls, locked doors, signs saying

DON’T

If someone you don’t know, says hello, you get uptight: “What’s he want?” It’s taboo to talk to strang- ers. Everybody’s h u s t l i n g. The streets are paved with terror, the city a prison for the soul.

The car, a box, transports lonely people from the box where they sleep to the box where they work, and then back to the box where they sleep. Amerikans relate to each other as drivers of other cars; the only good

driver is the one who takes another road. People killed on freeways are casualties of a war every bit as fuck- ed up as Vietnam.

The streets are for business, not people. You can’t sit in a restaurant without buying food; you can read magazines in a istore—e-you gotta buy, buy, buy—move on, move on. What if you’re in the middle of the city and suddenly you have to take a shit?

Tough shit.

We are liberating the city, turning the streets into our living rooms. We live, work, eat, play and sleep togeth- er with our friends on the streets. Power is our ability to stand on a street corner and do nothing. / We are creating youth ghettos in every city, luring into the streets everyone Who is bored at home, school or work. And everyone is looking for “something to do.”

For us empty pockets means libera- tion——-from draft cards, Checkbooks, credit cards, registration papers—we are close to our naked bodies.

The hippie area becomes the first mass alternative to the Amerikan ur— ban prison. Lilberated neighborhoods are a great threat to capitalist city life. So the force-s of death -—- the business community, cop-s and politi-

cians —— conspire to wipe us out. An ‘

entire battery of laws — genocidal laws against the young —.— makes ‘so- cial life in the streets a crime.

If you don’t hand a cop document- ary pro-of of who you are, you can be arrested. To the state empty poc- kets means vagrancy.

Watching the world from a street corner is loitering. Hitchhiking is a crime. It’s against the law to pan- handle, to rap to a crowd in the streets, to give out free food in the streets, to stop traffic. Playing a harmonica in the streets is illegal in Venice, California.

TWO friends of mine were just ar- rected for the high political crime of pissing in the street. One was put into a mental hospital.

“Underage” kids caught on the

« streets are hauled straight to juven-

ile court.

_ And when all else fails, they estab- lish a curfew, a Nazi law designed to prevent us from getting together.

These laws are designed to strike fear in the youth community. Al— though they exist on the books every- where, they are enforced only in the ghetto. COps patrol the hippie areas the way they patrol black communi- ties, the way Amerikan soldiers pat- rol Vietnamese villages. Everyone is a likely enemy.

But the main strategy for destroy- ing the free spirit is business. “Psy- chedelic” stores try to steal the cul- ture by selling fake arti-facts to an emotion-starved Outside World. Cam- eratoting Amerikan tourists come through in buses and on foot, snap- ping pictures, laughing, squealing, pointing at us.

The streets turn into a hustle, a business section. whom to trust. Burn artists and un- dercover cops flood the place, making it unsafe to buy or sell dope on the street. , ' ‘

We become an island in a capitalist sea, attacked and i filtrated‘ from inside and outside. e death culture tries to destroy our life force and re- structure the youth ghetto in its own

we never know-

FEBRUARY 20; 1970

image. We lack space in Our own‘ community —— to breathe, conspire, celebrate, grow.

It is a War for land. Our survival depends on our ability to drive out the psychedelic exploiters, the invad- ing pigs and the’ politicians, and cre—L ate youth communities Where drop- ?ut from middle-clacc Amerika can we.

Our goal is to create fires, black- outs, subway stoppages, strikes and snowstorms because only in crisis

does liberation come to a city. People

meet their neighbors for the first time while watching their apartment buildings burn down. When the sub; way rumbles along, everyone acts as

if no one else is aboard. As soon as »

there’s a breakdown, people start

talking to strangers. During snow-' ' storms New York is a playground,

an amusement park.

Crisis brings liberation to a city.

The revolution declares all land

r titles null and void. We are urban

and rural liberators, seizing land for the people. No more “I own it!” Peo- ple who believe they can own natural resources, industries or land are really candidates for mental institu- tions. ’-

We will bringthe war to the sub- urbs. The middle class creates sub-

urbs as a sanctuary from the fire of ’

the city. Children raised in the stub- urbs are treated as mentally and phy- sically retarded. If we are not safe in our communities, why should cor- porate executives be safe in theirs?

We’ll get our own tourist buses, steal cameras and ride through the suburbs squealing, laughing, snap- ping and pointing fingers. ‘ ‘

In a revolution there are no sane; tuarles. I .

This is an excerpt from a forthcoming book by Jerry Rubin called “Do it!” It wll be released by Simon and Schuster later this month. The book contains 43 chapters and was laid out by Quentin Fiore, and in- cludes more than 100 pictures, cartoons and flipped_ out McLuhanesque acid layout. '