Okay, so I'm working on a very crucial chapter in a novel, and I'm stuck. Considering the content of the piece, I figured the members of this forum would be more likely to offer the help that I need. I don't want to explain every little detail of the entire novel up until now (about 12 chapters) so I'll just summarize it: The novel takes place in 2321. As far as my main characters know, there is absolutely NOTHING outside of their post-apocalyptic city run by a tyrant who is slowly dying of old age. The citizens have lived there for generations, and all knowledge of the past has slowly been replaced by propaganda. As far as these people know, there are no plants, there are no animals, there is nowhere else to go. (The people in this city have absolutely no idea what animals or plants even look like.) The four main characters become part of a secret underground society determined to keep the King's son from taking the throne. (It'd kinda be like if Hitler was the ruler of the "last" civilization in the world, and there was nobody strong enough to stop him...Only this guy is going to leave the throne to someone who's even worse.) At this point in the novel, my main characters have learned that there is a group of people living outside of the city called The Collectors. They are a community of scavengers who have been collecting and saving documents, books, technology, and various other items from before the big disaster that ruined the earth. They happen to have a journal in their collection that the main characters must return to the city. (It holds the name of someone who is supposed to rule the city if the king dies.) Here's where I need help from other hippies... Imagine you grew up in a sheltered city, forced to believe that your king is a god, forced to obey every law or face execution, and then one day you escape to find a community of people who are hippies of the future. Imagine living your entire life in a cage, and then breaking out and hearing music (which the main characters have NEVER heard), seeing videos of protests, and watching people stand up for themselves and fight for their rights. How would it affect you if you learned that, for thousands of years, people have been finding ways to make a difference? Would it be enough to encourage you to take action against the king, and free the city from tyranny? Frankly, I'm having a hard time coming up with a logical enough reason why four young adults would take on a tyrant and his army and "go against the grain" in a BIG kinda way, just because of some 60's music and some "old" footage of kids waving signs and people marching in the streets. Sorry to sound like an idiot, but public schools don't exactly teach us much about the last hundred years. It's amazing how many kids today don't even know about what happened at Kent State. Reading about that gives me chills, and yet most of the kids I was in school with had no idea what happened there. It seems like history really IS being slowly replaced, or just forgotten altogether. I hate to ask, but how many other incidents have occured that are similar, or were big enough to be used as a reference in this chapter? Thanks in advance for any advice, and if you could provide links, that would be GREAT.
Exactly. I'm thinking of something along those lines, but in a much shorter time frame, like maybe one year. I'm not just talking about "hippy" examples of activism, but rather any form of protest that was enough to reach people. Like the burning monks. I mean, to watch people actually burn themselves to death? How could anyone NOT be affected after seeing that? And no, you troll, there are no clowns.
I think finding a way for the movement to spread throughout the society is more difficult than coming up with a reason for it. As you say, four people aren't going to be able to take on the tyrant by themselves. But the analogy with the hippies in the 60's doesn't really work, because 1960's America was a vastly different political system than a 2300 tyranny. The American system is built to accomodate this sort of thing, your society isn't. This theme has been addressed before, and you probably know more about how it was handled than I do. I remember Ayn Rand's Anthem, for instance. But even there, we aren't told how the "revolution" was fomented, if I remember correctly. Maybe it would be more helpful to take a cue from actual revolutionary movements in history. How did they spread? How were the Russian peasants moved to overthrow the czar? How were the French led to the Bastille?
In June 1970 I attended a war protest rally in Isla Vista, California, USA which was all flowers and peace in the park by day, followed by vicious repression by busloads of cops that night. It was a month after the Kent State massacre. It was like the Siege of Chicago two years earlier, on a smaller scale. The pigs were storming into private homes and beating the residents. I remember standing on a dark, deserted, littered street next to a burning dumpster, more or less by myself, wondering which way the attack was going to come from. Revolution or street fighting didn't look very appetizing at the time. I was smart enough to get out of there and get taken in off the street by some sympathetic locals before the Ventura cops swept the street. (Yes, cops from Ventura, thirty miles away.) You have to be really, really committed and have a halfway decent plan if you're going to face down clubs, gas and rubber bullets or worse. A fringe element, the Weathermen, returned the violence during those years. I wouldn't say they were wrong. However, if you're going to hit back you have to consider the other protesters on the streets with you who might be endangered by your actions. Recommended movie: "Battle For Seattle". A well done re-enactment of largely peaceful protests against the World Trade Organization summit being held there in 1999. It shows vicious police brutality including the clubbing of a pregnant woman, causing her to miscarry. It also shows uninvited radicals smashing store windows, with march leaders being unable to stop them.Well, I came upon a child of God He was walking along the road And I asked him, Tell me, where are you going? This he told me Said, I'm going down to Yasgur's Farm, Gonna join in a rock and roll band. Got to get back to the land and set my soul free. We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion year old carbon, And we got to get ourselves back to the garden. Well, then can I roam beside you? I have come to lose the smog, And I feel myself a cog in somethin' turning. And maybe it's the time of year, Yes and maybe it's the time of man. And I don't know who I am, but life is for learning. We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion year old carbon, And we got to get ourselves back to the garden. By the time we got to Woodstock, we were half a million strong And everywhere was a song and a celebration. And I dreamed I saw the bomber death planes riding shotgun in the sky, Turning into butterflies above our nation. We are stardust, we are golden, we are caught in the devils bargain, And we got to get ourselves back to the garden. -- Joni Mitchell, "Woodstock", 1969
There is a good description of the process, of how it feels on the street, in Leon Trotsky's work, The History of the Russian Revolution. See also, John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World.
Not to mention a very strong and impenetrable underground organization. Remember what happened to Winston in 1984.
I just thought about it and i cant really come up with an answer...Why do they have to take on a tyrant or one those?Why does that have to happen? Cant something else happen, like slowly letting the word spread around about this other place and then picking dates when sectors of the city leaves?Or something like that?...Because the whole rebellion is kind overplayed these days or its a reoccuring theme i find...Ill see what iam able to come up with lol
My understanding is that currently American high school history courses typically allocate one period (about 50 minutes) to the Vietnam war, and occasionally an additional period to the war resistance and related cultural events. There are of course complete books on these subjects -- visit your library. You might have a look at Norman Mailer's work, The Armies of The Night, on the October 1967 Pentagon demonstration. With few exceptions, every college campus in America was the site of repeated anti-war protests in those years. Every sizable city was rocked by demonstrations, and the bigger ones (such as in New York, Washington D.C., Chicago, Los Angeles, Oakland, Seattle) were often bloody. It wasn't all flowers and free love.
Powerful technology via the collectors? Non peaceful means seem like the only viable ones. Unless that's not what you're trying to say. OR you could write a message that hasn't already been written a thousand times over. OR sewer clown.
What about a charismatic leader of the hippies, a bard who shows them harmony through music and inspires them to action through his words, who is a fighter and a rebel but most of all a poet with understanding of the deeper meaning of reality. I could see people rallying around someone like that, as a foundation for a poignant event (massacre, collective poisoning, etc.) that catalyzes the resistance. Check out the race riots of 1964 as incendiary moments, or the inciting impetus behind the Weatherpeople or the Motherfuckers...
A leader of the hippies. A lead on my trout line. A Confederate General From Big Sur. Take me to your leader. Thanks. (Goes to this underground dive somewhere and meets Andy Warhol type.) You're the leader? Cool. Just tell me what to do and I'll follow. Go down to the Sheriff's Department and demand my immediate arrest? Maybe they will, what then. It's all right, the lnmate Watch Commander is a friend of mine. Now I have a cell phone. Shout down the toilet and everyone on this side of the range can here me if no one flushes. Room for one more inside Sir. Sure beats sitting on the beach watching the tide come in, don't it? So maybe you haven't been reading much lately but the fact is there are 2.3 million Americans behind bars as you read this. Congress loves it, the taxpayers love it. America shits money and it has plenty of money to lock you up for longer than you'd like to think about. All been contracted out to CCA (Correctional Corporation of America) and their clones. Growth industry like you wouldn't believe. Or maybe your idea of a good time is toughing it out with the niggers on D block in the LA County MCJ (Mens' Central Jail) or maybe across Bauchet Street at Twin Towers, the Largest Jail In The World? They had hippies in mind when they built that thing, you better believe it. No accounting for tastes I always say. You think fascism is something America defeated in 1945 ???
