Radicals, Dude

You know how it is, once you become interested in something you are hyper-aware of that something everywhere you look. As you know from my recent posts (here and here), I've had 70s era terrorism and the whole revolutionary counter-establishment movement and my mind. So, of course, I came across a very telling statement in a book I just completed (and highly recommend), Popular Crime by Bill James.

They were good people, intent on making the world a better place. But in their intense desire to make the world a better place, a few of them had trapped themselves in a paranoid fantasy about the world in which they actually lived. Few of them had never suffered anything very much, and, as they were focused on the suffering of the oppressed, they needed suffering to feel authentic.

...Some of the radicals had slipped inside a prism of unforgivable injustices, and they saw the world through that prism. The rays of the sun turned left when they passed through the radical rainbow, and nothing they said or did made any sense when you got outside their bubble. (284)

I think that's a pretty fair assessment. Not for the extremists and natural born troublemakers, but for the majority of the followers. Those dumb kids probably had noble intentions, or at least believed they did, but they weren't called radicals for nothing. Nothing good ever comes from extremism or fundamentalism. Except some films, of course.