What was most striking about Jeffrey David Powell the other day was his cocksureness.
“I am proud,” he declared to reporters, “to have fought for my country against the criminal government of Richard Nixon, and I am very happy not to be at war with my government now.”
On the lam for the last 24 years for his role in the 1969 Days of Rage rampage by the radical Weathermen, Powell surfaced Thursday and turned himself in to face justice. His penalty: 18 months of probation, a $500 fine and $210 in court costs.
But for Powell there was no contrition like that which characterized another 1960s radical, Katherine Ann Power, when she turned herself in in Boston a few months ago to face charges in connection with the killing of a police officer in a 1970 bank robbery (an effort to liberate funds to finance the revolution).
Maybe contrition wasn’t warranted. Powell says he wasn’t guilty of whacking that Chicago cop who needed almost 70 stitches to close his head wound. (The state’s attorney’s office dropped the aggravated battery charge against Powell.) And in historical hindsight, the Days of Rage was not that big a deal anyway.
But it was that cocksureness that was striking, that air of moral certainty that pervaded the anti-war movement and made uncomfortable even many people who shared its goals.
“Though the Vietnam War and the insurrections in America’s cities have ended, the scars and social injustices are still with us, bearing bitter fruit,” Powell lectured. “As the generation that came of age in the ’60s comes to power, we must ask ourselves how to right the wrongs, how to heal the wounds, what kind of nation, what kind of culture, what kind of future will we build for our children.”
Does he really suppose that we-the generation that came of age in the ’60s and all the rest-have been indifferent to those issues before now? For better or worse, we have all been asking those questions and building a future for our children every day for the past 24 years.
