Greff Fabrics Blues, 1971 (ii)

With nothing happening much anymore politically in New York City in terms of a New Left Movement by August 1971, working collectively as part of some radical aboveground anti-imperialist political collective no longer seemed like an option for me. In late August 1971 I heard some vague news that George Jackson had been killed in prison in California. Prior to August 1971, his case and imprisonment had seemed more of an issue that California radicals and West Coast radicals responded to and too far away for radicals on the East Coast to get involved in. But the fact that prison authorities felt they could get away with assassinating George Jackson in late August 1971 reinforced my feeling that the New Left Movement for radical change--or at least its aboveground component--no longer posed any kind of immediate revolutionary political threat to either the Nixon regime or the U.S. white corporate power structure.

So during the last 4 months of 1971 I was more into just writing prose and writing folk love songs and protest folk songs than into any kind of either individual or collective radical political activism. Most people around me in the New York City area still seemed politically brainwashed or manipulated by the U.S. mass media; and the only way I felt I was able to respond to what I regarded as the low political consciousness of nearly all the people around me was to try to raise their consciousness in small ways via writing prose or folk songs, despite not having any outlet for either my prose or my protest folk songs.