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!