Today in Labor History February 4, 1974: The Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) kidnapped Patty Hearst, granddaughter of American publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, in Berkeley, California. One of the SLA’s demands for releasing Hearst was for her family to pay for millions of dollars’ worth of food to be given out free the poor and unhoused of the San Francisco Bay Area. The Hearst complied, with various community organizations distributing 100,000 bags of groceries at 16 sites in 4 counties, before violence brought the program to a halt. The violence occurred because the crowds were bigger than expected and workers started throwing boxes of food off of moving trucks. As a captive, Patty Hearst was held in a closet, blindfolded, with her hands tied, raped and threatened repeatedly with death. She was later offered the choice of freedom, or joining the SLA. She chose the latter. Consequently, she was later sentenced to 35 years in prison for her complicity in SLA robberies. After several years in prison, her sentence was commuted by President Carter. President Clinton pardoned her. Congressional Representative Leo Ryan was murdered by the Jim Jones cult in Guyana several weeks after collecting signatures for her release. Actor John Wayne, of all people, expressed frustration that everyone accepted the idea that Jones had brainwashed hundreds of his followers into mass suicide, but wouldn’t accept that the SLA could have brainwashed a teenage girl. After her release, Hearst went on to become an actress, appearing in several John Waters films, as well as many others.
@MikeDunnAuthor@weilawei I can see that. If you don't like violence, it pays to be really easy to make peace with and seriously expensive to make war against at the same time.
Consider the situation between us LGBTQ folks in the South vs Evangelical Christians. A classic "tribal enemes" conflict, except that we have no ambition whatsoever against how they live their own lives. All we want from them is to be left alone, and for those born into their society and not liking it to be allowed to leave. Nothing more.
They want the ability to destroy all aspects of our lifestyles even in places we bar them from, they want to be able to torture their own kids if those kids turn out not to be cishet, they want total control.
We cannot live with that-literally. They are fighting for exactly nothing while we are fighting for the right to exist.