Workin’ At Travelers Aid Revisited Continued (Conclusion)

Yet by the summer of 1974, the Weather Underground Organization [WUO] had published its Prairie Fire pamphlet, which indicated that it was moving towards a revolutionary anti-imperialist strategy in the USA that would attempt to create a Revolution in the USA by focusing more on encouraging above-ground Movement organizers to attempt to mobilize the multi-racial U.S. working-class to make the Revolution; at the same time the WUO continued to periodically respond to particular atrocities of the US. government, by carrying out militant actions (often inside the bathrooms of U.S. government or corporate buildings) against various symbolic targets.

And, as part of its post-Prairie Fire pamphlet political strategy for making the Revolution in the USA during the 1970s, the WUO pushed its aboveo-ground anti-imperialist revolutionary Movement supporters to then set up chapters of an above-ground group, called “The Prairie Fire Organizing Committee [PFOC]”, to both arrange mass distribution of its Prairie Fire pamphlet and attempt to organize more anti-imperialist Movement people and U.S. working-class people to begin class struggle again, in accordance with the WUO’s changed strategy.

So, after I wrote a folk song, “I Saw You Today”, which, in its original version, was inspired by thinking about one of the WUO woman leaders who was then still underground when I was working at Travelers Aid-International Social Services, I then included the song on a “basement tape” of some of the new folk songs I had written, which I recorded on my cheap cassette tape recorder; and mailed the tape to the post office box number or mailing address that a flyer of the NYC chapter of PFOC had urged Movement folks interested in getting involved with PFOC to contact.

But instead of responding to my “basement tape” and expression of interest in possibly getting involved in the NYC PFOC chapter, by arranging to meet me in person somewhere in NYC to have some kind of face-to-face political discussion or expressing an eagerness to meet with me in my Red Hook apartment, the only response I received from the NYC PFOC group was a flyer inviting me to attend their next public meeting in Manhattan.

And their lack of interest or caution about attempting to recruit me to their group as quickly as possible, after I mailed them my basement tape of folk songs, made me feel both less interested in relating to the NYC PFOC group and less confident that they would have much success in recruiting above-ground former 1960s New Left Movement veterans, like myself, that I had initially assumed.

So, although I wrote a folk song, with the lyric line “You gotta be a football hero to be a president”, after Gerald Ford was substituted as the U.S. power elite’s president, following Nixon’s summer resignation, while I was near the end of my wage-enslavement time at Travelers Aid-International Social Services, within the 9-to-5 “real world”, as well as in the off-campus weekend world, there still seemed little evidence in the middle 1970s that a Movement freeing U.S. workers from 9-to-5 slavery and creating a classless society would soon develop.

And, at the same time, within Viet Nam, the war there had still not yet ended at the time I left my job at Travelers Aid-International Social Services, despite all the large antiwar demonstrations in Washington, D.C. and years of U.S. antiwar Movement protests within the USA against continued U.S. government support for the anti-communist Thieu puppet regime there.

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