A Hairy Tale

At a Freedom Rally at the Washington Monument during the Moratorium heyday, a group of entertainers sang a song recorded by Merle Haggard which put down the hippie type. “We don’t let our hair grow long and shaggy; like the hippies down in San Francisco do,” etc. I looked around at the participants in the rally and was rather disheartened. There were aging veterans in their old uniforms, businessmen in their raincoats and fedoras, young men with their hair greased straight back, all waving American flags and cheering. The thing that disturbed me was that they were not cheering for America, they were cheering the attack on anyone with long hair.

I attended the rally because I belong to YAF (the traditionalist faction), yet I wear my hair rather long, and at the time I had on a suede coat and blue jeans. When I moved closer to the rostrum to hear what Mendel Rivers was saying, I got looks of distaste, even hate.

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Nicholas V. Yermakov

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At a Freedom Rally at the Washington Monument during the Moratorium heyday, a group of entertainers sang a song recorded by Merle Haggard which put down the hippie type. “We don’t let our hair grow long and shaggy; like the hippies down in San Francisco do,” etc. I looked around at the participants in the rally and was rather disheartened. There were aging veterans in their old uniforms, businessmen in their raincoats and fedoras, young men with their hair greased straight back, all waving American flags and cheering. The thing that disturbed me was that they were not cheering for America, they were cheering the attack on anyone with long hair.

I attended the rally because I belong to YAF (the traditionalist faction), yet I wear my hair rather long, and at the time I had on a suede coat and blue jeans. When I moved closer to the rostrum to hear what Mendel Rivers was saying, I got looks of distaste, even hate.