Freedom Fighters of The Year
A partial history:
- 1990, Thom Harris
- 1991, Rodger Belknap
- 1992, Elvy Musikka
- 1993, Gatewood Galbraith
- 1994, Jack Herer
- 1999, Gideon Israel
- 2000, Keith Stroup
- 2001, Vivian McPeak
- 2002, Shawn Heller
- 2003, Valerie and Mike Corral
- 2004, Eddy Lepp
- 2005, Alex Whiteplume
- 2006, Richard Lee
- 2007, Tommy Chong
- 2009, Rick Simpson
- 2010, Dale Gieringer
- 2011, Debbie Goldsberry
- 2012, Mason Tvert
According to Steven Hager's Myspace blog:
John Howell hired me as High Times executive editor around 1987. For amusement I started writing a column called "Ed Hassle" in the news section. The column was a parody of "Ed Anger," a hilarious right-winger who was appearing in the Weekly World News. Ed Anger columns were being read over the airwaves by my favorite deejay, Bill Kelly of WFMU. But instead of being a rightwing lunatic, my Ed Hassle was a hippie fascist who grew pot and believed in alien abductions. I eventually worked the concept into a cartoon strip drawn by Flick Ford. One day High Times got an invitation to the Hash Bash in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Apparently the event was about to die, and some local stoners were hoping High Times could help resurrect it. Ed Hassle made a plea for all marijuana activists to attend the Hash Bash in Ann Arbor to hold a convention to create a national group called the Freedom Fighters. Hassle suggesting bringing drums and dressing in Colonial-style outfits. (This was a publicity ploy for news cameras and opened the door for interviews about hemp in Colonial times.) My band, The Soul Assassins, drove to the event in a psychedelic bus, marched into the Diag at the University of Michigan with a fife and drum corps of psychedelic pirates. That night, the Soul Assassins performed to a standing room crowd at a local bar. The Freedom Fighters organized free campgrounds for many rallies and provided free food to activists. The biggest supporter was a West Virginian named Rodger Belknap, who was also the first person to be voted Freedom Fighter of the Year. Eventually it became clear the group had been targeted for surveillance and many leaders dropped out while others were railroaded into jail with unusually harsh sentences, including Rodger Belknap.
After the Freedom Fighters were about a year old, I decided to drop the "Ed Hassle" persona because it had gotten confused with another High Times columnist, Ed Rosenthal. In order to re-write the history off the origins of the group, I asked my friend Allegra to interview me for my own magazine. Unfortunately, the interview was perceived as signs of a messianic power trip and very quickly led to serious problems. I'd naively set out to throw a party and suddenly found myself in the center of a cultural tidal wave. The pressure got so intense I turned the Freedom Fighter mailing list over to NORML, and that was the end of the Freedom Fighters and also the end of any attempts at political activism or organizing.
Read more about this topic: High Times Freedom Fighters
Famous quotes containing the words freedom, fighters and/or year:
“U.S. international and security policy ... has as its primary goal the preservation of what we might call “the Fifth Freedom,” understood crudely but with a fair degree of accuracy as the freedom to rob, to exploit and to dominate, to undertake any course of action to ensure that existing privilege is protected and advanced.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“O can’t you see, brother—
Death’s a congested road for fighters now,
and hero a cheap label.”
—C.D. Andrews (1913–1992)
“It’s not that we want the political jobs themselves ... but they seem to be the only language the men understand. We don’t really want these $200 a year jobs. But the average man doesn’t understand working for a cause.”
—Jennie Carolyn Van Ness (b. c. 1890–?)