Abbie Hoffman: A Present Day Monologue :: essays research papers fc

My name is Abbie Hoffman. Steal this speech while square dancing in the Ice ages, it’s soon to be a major motion picture†¦ Yippie! Do you know what that means? That means that there’s a revolution on, that we can change an H to a Y., that we can bring more than 10,000 people to Lincoln Park in Chicago on a myth, a rumor, a story. Yippie! It means the home of the FREE and the land of the BRAVE. Chicago was a place for the brave to fight for their freedom. When we came to chicago, we thought, hey, they’ll put up some resistance, but they’ll give us a permit to have our little Yippie! get-together in the park. I mean shit, it’s our right. Mayor Daley, he didn’t give a shit about our â€Å"rights† he didn’t want one goddamn hippie in his city, let alone 10,000. He didn’t want chicago to have that reputation, HE didn’t want to have that reputation. Do you know what happened in Chicago? According to Mayor Daley, only a few minor injuries due to resisting arrest and rioting; according to some outside sources, and my own count, a couple people died and a lot of people were wounded because the pigs were beating on us for practicing our right to assemble peacefully. Hell, we were peaceful, a damn sight more peaceful than the cops. We were assembled to protest war, all we wanted to do was get together and smoke a little weed. The cops, they came at us with arms swinging. But I get ahead of myself. You’re all so young, you don’t know about Chicago’s other, meaner side.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  In Chicago, we Yippies wanted to have a rally, and Chicago was really central to the movement, so we petitioned the Chicago Parks Department for a permit to have bands come play during the week of the Democratic Convention in 1968. They stalled, and pretended to have little problems with the permit. No one was fooled. We sued them for denying us our constitutional rights; but we withdrew our suit when we saw who our judge was. His name was Judge Lynch, and he was mayor Daley’s friend or cousin or something. Very ironic...the next judge that we went before because the city was stalling was Judge Stahl. S-T-A-H-L. So in a nutshell, we said â€Å"can we have a get-together in the park?