Flowers and Politics
The term achieved shades of political meaning when San Francisco Bay Area Flower Children gathered in Berkeley, California in April 1969 to participate in the planting of flowers, shrubs, grass, and trees during the building of People's Park. After authorities destroyed People's Park and installed an 8 ft (2.4 m) tall chain-link wire fence around its perimeter, planting flowers became a symbol of peaceful resistance.
In the October 21, 1967 march on the Pentagon, protesters were quickly surrounded by Federal troops. Actor George Harris put flowers in the barrels of the soldiers' guns. Photographer Bernie Boston snapped a picture which has become a familiar image of the 1960s antiwar movement. Inspired by Harris' idealistic gesture, protesters at Kent State University three years later were still putting flowers in National Guardsmen's guns.
Read more about this topic: Flower Child
Famous quotes containing the words flowers and, flowers and/or politics:
“The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit,—not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There is a close relationship between flowers and convicts. The fragility and delicacy of the former are of the same nature as the brutal insensitivity of the latter.”
—Jean Genet (1910–1986)
“Our democracy, our culture, our whole way of life is a spectacular triumph of the blah. Why not have a political convention without politics to nominate a leader who’s out in front of nobody?... Maybe our national mindlessness is the very thing that keeps us from turning into one of those smelly European countries full of pseudo-reds and crypto-fascists and greens who dress like forest elves.”
—P.J. (Patrick Jake)