The Scolding

A Free Food Station set up outside one of their houses, The Diggers in action. The food was gleaned from a farmer's market.

The Diggers were one of the legendary groups in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, one of the world-wide epicenters of the Sixties Counterculture which fundamentally changed American and world culture. Shrouded in a mystique of anonymity, the Diggers took their name from the original English Diggers (1649-50) who had promulgated a vision of society free from private property, and all forms of buying and selling. The San Francisco Diggers evolved out of two Radical traditions that thrived in the SF Bay Area in the mid-1960s: the bohemian/underground art/theater scene, and the New Left/civil rights/peace movement.

The Diggers combined street theater, anarcho-direct action, and art happenings in their social agenda of creating a Free City. Their most famous activities revolved around distributing Free Food every day in the Park, and distributing "surplus energy" at a series of Free Stores (where everything was free for the taking.)

Want to know more? Go here

I stayed in a Diggers crash pad for the rest of a long night in January, 1967. The first part of the night I was at one of the ballrooms dancing on Acid. The next night was on the beach making music all night long, tribal stuff, pounding on logs and all that by the bonfire. We were strangers, I think, not just me but most of us. Then I got to the bus station and with the last of my money got a ticket back to San Jose. In San Jose I was living on the street, eating very little and assisted by my friends who had a little more than me. I had a broke down car and little else. At least the car was parked where it wasn't bothering anyone and it was big enough that I could sleep in the back of it. Mostly I scored warmer places to sleep.

The Scolding

Your suppressed beatnik
spoke up today, told us all
off, told us all where
to go while squinting
in all that pot smoke, that dope
smoke around the place
you made for loving
but I guess we just will not
behave to your full
time satisfaction.

‎October ‎27, ‎2010 8:52 PM