A Remarkable Document ten happens in demonstrations and strikes," he said. "The soft-hearted lambs get led to the slaughter, but the wolves cleverly steal away to continue their attacks." Around 4:00 a.m. President Grayson Kirk entered his office for the first time in six davs. It was a shambles. His great desl~ had been gashed and damaged. Several upholstered chairs were ripped and broken. His bookshelves had been rifled and hundreds of books were spilled on the floor. One of his wastebaskets had a faint odor of urine. On a precious Oriental rug were spilled tin cans of sardines and soup, half-eaten sandwiches and orange peels, stained blankets and birth control pills, boxes of band-aids and jars of vaseline. His personal pictures and private possessions were either smashed or had obscenities scrawled on them. His files had been looted. The adjoining offices were almost as messy. For the first time in the rebellion, the icy, dignified Dr. Kirk lost his composure. His eyes grew moist and he shook his head in disbelief. "How could civilized human beings act this waY?" he asked. He wandered around the' suite as if in a trance. The sight of his office pierced him in a wav that SDS rhetoric, profanity, and allegations had not. Shortlv after, Vice President David B. Trun~an walked home to breakfast in his Riverside Drive apartment. He wept like a bo:-,. He had heard the reports of the police action on College Walk and South Field and hurt for the students and faculty who were beaten. He knew that the Administration's reluctance to call in the police would now be forgotten and that he and Dr. Kirk would be assailed as heartless criminals who relished the beating of teenage students. SDS rigidity and faculty failures would be dismissed, and Administration brutality would be put in their place. The other buildings, except Mathematics, showed less damage. Cleanest of all was Hamilton, where only the Dean of Students' office, used as the black protestors' headquarters, was untidy. No faculty offices were entered. A sign in Room 303 read "Leave everything alone." There were also sians for "Lost and Found," shower b schedules (for boys and girls), a blackboard of Chinese writing, poetry, SPRING, 1968
This fragment of a larger document was found in the Men's Room in Low Library by GGT's editor following the police removal of revolutionary stlldents fTOm that building on April 30, 1968. 1t was marked "Preamble" and was the opening of a statement titled "A Declaration of Libemtion." A DEGLARATlON OF LIRERATlON When things get so rotten and screwed up that the people and the students of a country have to smash their power structure and the repressive, imperialist system that sustains it, and to go it on their own, everyone doing his own thing-as their natural riuhts entitle them to do-then they really should tell everybody, b openly, why they arc forced to do it. Look there are certain truths that no one can deny. Everybody is creat~d good and beautiful and equal. So we're as great as anybody else in this sick culture, and probably a hell of a lot better. Second, everybody has their rights, lots of them, and no one on earth, not even a professor or a mother, has any business interfering with any of them. Among these is the right to Life, a birr full beautiful life-without middle-class hangups like money:' res;onsibility, examinations and grades, the Puritan ethic, military service, and pressures. Another is Liberty, the right to come and go as you please, whenever you please, without the government manipulators, crummy businessmen, religious spooks, uptight parents, the stupid CIA, the sadistic cops, and the really out-of-it college Administrators imposing their totalitarianism. Also, there is the pursuit of Happiness, the moral right to have a fun time, to blow your mind, to sleep around, to turn on, however and whenever you like-so long as you don't interfere with anybody else. Now, it's only because you sometimes have to protect these rights from right-wing idiots and jocks that governments have any right to exist at all. But politicians and everybody in authority must be totally and at every minute responsible to the people in the streets and the students. That's where all power comes from. As soon as government, or authority of any kind, starts pushing people around or impinging on any liberties with their decrees, the people have a perfect right to tear down that power structure and build a better one based on love and total freedom. Of course, you don't have to start a revolution every time some~hing bugs you. You really should wait until the guys in charge prove how totally corrupt and inept they actually are. If you check out recent experiences, you'll see that most people do keep their cool and tend to put up with an amazing amount of crap before they move into action. But, when things just get ridiculous, and one incredibly stupid or brutal act after another by The Establishment leaves you no choice except to become an alienated person, a digit in their IBM set-up, a helpless part of their murderous machine, you just have to wipe it out. In fact, at such times it's the absolute moral obligation of the people in the streets and the students, who have thought a lot about these things (but not so much that they have become bogged down in facts and ideas and forgotten the necessity for action) to go into guerilla warfare, using wild, imaginative tactics-as well as the press and television-until they win. No compromises! No deals! That's the situation in this country, man, right now. Like here are the facts on some of the absurd and repressive deals we have had to put up with....
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