Youth in charge: Ken Wachsberger’s Thumbs Up
By Ari Smith
At the July 17 book launch for Ann Arbor resident Ken Wachsberger’s memoir Thumbs Up: Memoir of a Joyful Organizer, Wachsberger lived up to the title of his newest book, chatting with each attendee with such excitement that it was difficult to tell who he’d already known beforehand. Wachsberger is a well-known writing coach and editor. His four-volume collection, Voices from the Underground, is an invaluable resource of the history of the 1960s and 1970s anti-war movement as lived on the ground (and underground). His new memoir, though, is his most personal writing to date.
Instead of reading excerpts from his new memoir, Wachsberger nearly bounced across the stage as he told stories from his long life and the myriad ways he was involved with the Yippies and Zippies (the names for members of the Youth International Party and Zeitgeist International Party, the latter a split-off from YIP), the anti-war movement and the underground press, to organizing tenant and labor unions, and finally to his work naming Ann Arbor’s Temple Beth Emeth as a sanctuary for refugees facing deportation.
All of this could simply be a nostalgic look back on the past work of an older activist, but this was not a self-congratulation. “My time is done, realistically speaking,” Wachsberger says. “Youth are in charge.” But there’s still plenty to learn from Wachsberger’s experience.
So often we are taught to see civil rights movements as a closed bubble: their work complete, the activists vanish into the woodwork and the movement ends. New pushes for civil rights, even on the same subject, are looked at as completely separate from their predecessors. Contemporary activists are told that their work would be disdained by the heroes of the 60s and 70s, even as their student teach-ins are dispersed and attendees arrested. There are similarities, though, to when, for instance, Wachsberger was at a Kent State solidarity teach-in at Michigan State University in 1970, which helped set him on his path in the first place.
The importance of cross-generational involvement in civil rights organizing is evident in Wachsberger’s chapter on his time in Miami Beach, as Zippies came to town ahead of the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, scheduled in July and August of 1972, respectively. The anti-war activists needed a park to gather, eat, and sleep in, but the right-wing had already started frightening the local senior citizens (the average age of Miami Beach permanent residents was 65 at the time) with the violence that had broken out at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Zippie organizers, led by Wachsberger and Joyce Hodges, embarked on an outreach plan to meet with local residents, many of whom were Jewish, and humanize the activists.
“We realized that most of these old people had probably never met a hippie other than through the media, let alone touched one,” Wachsberger writes in his book, “so we visited the parks where they spent their afternoons and the free lunch programs where many of them ate their only meal of the day. We sang songs, spoke, and passed out leaflets telling who we were and why we were there. Meanwhile, we petitioned them for signatures to demand that city council give us a campsite.” This young-old coalition resulted in a shared space for both the residents and activists in Flamingo Park, and culminated in a “Wedding of the Generations,” where the youth and elderly were joined in a symbolic ceremony officiated by Jewish poet Allen Ginsberg, who acted as “rabbi.” The same community that was told to fear these young hippies then sheltered them as they fled from the tear gas released during the protests at the DNC.
A common refrain today is a sense of hopelessness. Things are so overwhelming and dark in our society — how can we maintain our urgency, our dedication, our strength, against such tall odds? When asked as much, Wachsberger begins with a quip, saying, “I think I might be an idiot.” After the laughter fades, he turns to the words of Stew Albert, cofounder of the Yippies, who said “We can’t lose — we’re having too much fun!” It’s a lot easier to not laugh, Wachsberger tells his audience. But you have to hold onto that laughter, even go to bed laughing, in order to remember why it’s important to do this work in the first place. Even in the worst of it, you have to find reasons for joy. Wachsberger’s memoir can teach us about his methods, as well as helping us with our laughter.
