Goodbye Dr. Hoffman

Dr. Albert Hof­mann died yes­ter­day, April 29, 2008. Why haven’t I got­ten one of those “urgent news updates” from CNN or the Atlanta paper? Los­ing him is cer­tain­ly more news­wor­thy than most of the things they do alert me about, like sports scores!

A com­menter (and I don’t know where the com­ment went, unfor­tu­nate­ly) let me know that I’ve con­flat­ed two peo­ple. Abbie Hoff­man, whose quote is below, died in 1989.

From his own mouth, the clos­ing words from a speech at Van­der­bilt Uni­ver­si­ty in April 1989:

We are here to make a bet­ter world. No amount of ratio­nal­iza­tion or blam­ing can pre­empt the moment of choice each of us brings to our sit­u­a­tion here on this plan­et. The les­son of the ’60s is that peo­ple who cared enough to do right could change his­to­ry. …in the nine­teen-six­ties, apartheid was dri­ven out of Amer­i­ca. Legal segregation–Jim Crow–ended. We did­n’t end racism, but we end­ed legal seg­re­ga­tion. We end­ed the idea that you can send a mil­lion sol­diers ten thou­sand miles away to fight in a war that peo­ple do not sup­port. We end­ed the idea that women are sec­ond-class cit­i­zens. We made the envi­ron­ment an issue that could­n’t be avoid­ed. Now, it does­n’t mat­ter who sits in the Oval Office. But the big bat­tles that were won in that peri­od of civ­il war and strife you can­not reverse. We were young, we were reck­less, arro­gant, sil­ly, headstrong…and we were right! I regret nothing!